It’s way, way too hard to actually understand what I’m feeling. But I am so excited to go home, to see my family, and get ready to leave for college. This year has challenged me in ways that I did not anticipate, and did not challenge me in certain ways that I had wanted it to. This year has made me question myself over and over and I haven’t found the answers to those self-searching questions yet. I grew, but I can’t say that I grew enough in areas that I had hoped to – and I definitely regret (but couldn’t have changed) by the way I, myself, thought about exchange in general and my exchange specifically.

I’m looking forward to finding someone to talk about this all when I get home, but for now, I’m putting thinking aside, as far as I’m able. Only ten days left.

(ten is more dramatic than nine but strictly speaking since we leave at 2 AM I only have 9 days)

However, it’s definitely possible to start working against this right here in-country, and I’ve started doing something that I absolutely adore that has the extra benefit of making me feel more like myself again: hiking.

Although I went up Vodno, the hill/mountain right by Skopje a few times before (and blogged about it!), in the past week or so, I’ve hiked up with someone basically every other day. The weather brought greenery and life to the mountain, and it is so peaceful to hike up through the sounds of birds, the smell of flowers, and the sights of a variety of flora – even if it feels like death at some points (I’m still not as fit as I’d like to be!). It gives me time to think, something that is extremely important to me at this point in my year, when I honestly cannot tell how I feel. I escape from the social media that reminds me that some people are back home already and some people have almost a month more than me to go, and instead get to see a view of the beautiful city of Skopje from above. I get to think about how to do things like hiking more often in the future, and what else to pursue to achieve more self-fulfillment and put my year in Macedonia in perspective.

And I get to work off some of the burek and ajvar and leb and sharska and tost od sedmica and everything else delicious that I ate

May 1st is a nonworking day (Labor Day) in Macedonia, so my host family took the opportunity to host a FUN GET-TOGETHER for friends at the weekend house. Food, live band, lots of seating, some activities that I didn’t really get, singing, dancing – all the ingredients for entertainment were there. Part of the reason that it was so amazing was the location. I have realized that I love rural areas and the outdoors more than I ever thought possible, and any chance I get to spend time outside(like our recent trip to Radovish, where we stayed at a hotel in the mountains and had a barbecue also in the mountains) inevitably pumps me up while also calming me down.

The main reason this day was so good, though, was how much I got to interact with people – and on my own terms. I was able to sit, read, and enjoy the sun when everyone was doing their own thing, but also got to use Macedonian as various strangers realized I was American and began asking what I was doing there. There was no pressure to interact but many opportunities to do so, and I felt confident in my ability to learn from people and speak this language. It was brilliant.

//end of super short post\\

Instead, this is what is important – spring has come! There were a few days when it went directly from to winter to summer, but then the weather remembered how it’s all supposed to go and turned back into spring. Apparently, this was one of the coldest winters in recent years, and it was ages long. Spring is bringing joy and a lack of motivation for school (which is fine, honestly, because I’M GOING TO BERKELEY regardless of how well I do in my classes, as long as I don’t fail) in massive quantities, and the weather is signaling to me that one of my favorite times of year is approaching: Eurovision season.

I finally live in a country that actually participates in and gets excited about Eurovision! And our entry is magnificent:

(This is the Macedonian version – here is the English one, which I think is what will actually be competing:)

Sorry that I haven’t blogged in a while, but I think resident Macedonian heartthrob Daniel Kajmakoski (winner of X-Factor Balkans in 2014) makes up for it

Regardless of the fact that I actually did something interesting and exciting literally yesterday, I don’t feel like I’ve done much while I’ve been here. This is the point of the year when it seems like people start making reflections on their experience, and I don’t know what to reflect on. I feel like I haven’t done a good enough job as an exchange student – there are so many opportunities that I didn’t take and so many things that I could have done differently to make the experience “richer,” somehow (or more representative of what the “ideal study abroad experience” seems to be).

The thing is – I don’t regret anything in how I lived in these past 7 months (okay, maybe I wish I could have thought differently about certain things, but I tried to change those. I don’t regret any of my actual, action-impacting decisions – deciding to stay in and sleep instead of going to a concert, finishing homework instead of making my way out to a museum, and similarly boring choices). I’ve come to realize that even if I “didn’t do much,” exchange has changed me. I can’t explain how, because I can’t even imagine the person I would have been if I hadn’t gone abroad. But even though I didn’t seize the day enough, I’ve been living more closely to how I believe myself to be than at any other point in my life. It’s a process. Eventually, I trust that I’ll represent myself fully as the way I see myself from within.

On that grammatically confusing note, I’ll leave you to run to the store. Host dad is making cake

It feels like everything is almost over, but feels like there’s so much time left to go. I want time to speed up so I can get to certain milestones – college decisions, my birthday, mainly – but I feel like I wouldn’t have enough time if everything sped up. Time to do certain things that are required of me, but also time to do things that I feel that I personally need to. To get the most out of what I’m here for.

But I feel like my idea of what I’m here for has changed, even though I can’t identify how. There’s a lot of that – I can sense that my priorities, ideals, views, have changed, but I don’t think I’ll really be able to pinpoint where these changes lie until I get back. Changes like career goals are easy to identify: I was considering foreign service/diplomacy/international relations, and now I want to live in a rainforest and study sustainable agriculture/forestry/development. That’s hard to directly pin on any experiences here, though, so it doesn’t feel concrete enough to be a change that I can describe. Maybe I’ll be able to formulate this when I’m stateside?

And another thing I’m expecting stateside – to really recognize what’s different here. All aspects of my life here feel so very normal and ordinary to me right now that I can’t feel or remember what’s different. I slowly (in some cases) and quickly (in others) became used to how my life works here, and how that fits into how others’ work, and now I genuinely don’t know how it all differs – in part, because I don’t know how my life in the US functioned or will function in the future. Reverse culture shock may remind me of the culture shock here that I somehow was distracted from. And honestly, I wonder – what distracted me so much? Was it the mundanity of college applications, that started right as the lower points of the fabled culture shock graph kicked in? AP classes? My own brain? I’m unsure, but I’m excited to see how re-entering my home culture will affect this.

And I’m excited to see what I’ll miss the most. I appreciate this experience beyond anything that words can describe, yet I feel like I don’t appreciate it enough. I want to kick the emotional parts of my brain into feeling as humbled by the enormity of this experience as the rational part is (or is it the other way around?), and I want that to happen as soon as possible, before I leave this country – but I know, I know, I know, that as soon as I leave I’ll look back and truly recognize what a significant impact this country and this year have had. So what part of this impact will I really, truly, miss – and not just look back on fondly? I’m full of rhetorical questions today.

(P.S. A note to myself – I know when I was reading blogs, I never really found the “recap of my week” style to be interesting. I’m going to try to stay away from it, even though I am obsessive about documenting things if I begin documenting them. But my journal exists, and that information and memory will not be lost. WOOHOO. If you’re someone other than me reading this, despite the “note to myself” bit, and you DO find recaps interesting, contact me on twitter or facebook I guess?)

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that’s all for now

(okay quick boring updates for my own reference if ever reading this blog back to myself:

* Community Service at Sumnal – talkative and not-so-talkative children

* can’t figure out if I should take a gap year or not

* philosophy lecture at Academy of Arts+Sciences, COOL ARCHITECTURE

* anti-corruption lecture at American Corner

* Faber’s 1/2 birthday and so much food

* school doesn’t even matter, remember that, there’s so much more you can get from your experience than that, even if it feels like school is the reason i’m here almost all of the time

My primary, all-encompassing, oh-my-god-how-am-I-going-to-do-this goal for the second half of my exchange is to finish my Capstone Project, a requirement of YES Abroad that has you pick an aspect of your exchange or the culture of the country and create something that acts as a summary or reflection on that aspect. I thought of something that I now realize is very difficult to do – I’ll paste in my project proposal after the Read More, but keep in mind that my idea has already changed slightly and the proposal is getting more and more inaccurate as the days go by

64 days until I turn 17 // 133 days before I go back to the US

Project Title: Recycling and its Social Implications in Skopje

Project Goal:

With this project, I aim to investigate the unique process that recyclable materials go through in Skopje, and identify the role that the profits from this process play in the lives of members of the Roma community.
Background: 

Skopje is a city that does not have extremely well-organized public works systems as can be found in some cities in the U.S. and many cities in countries like Switzerland and Germany. However, despite the lack of well-established and universally dispersed recycling facilities and collection areas, Skopje does have an “unofficial” recycling system – facilitated by the Roma community. One of the first sights that struck me here in Macedonia was that of horse carts or motorcycle carts filled to the brim with cardboard or plastic, standing by the side of the road attended by a child while a relative searched for more materials in the trash. Upon questioning, I learned that this was a core source of income for many people, specifically in the Roma community, as they sold the materials to recycling centers for profit.
My decision to investigate this topic stems from several reasons, addressing two main issues. The first issue is simply that of the recycling of recyclable things. I am interested in the way cities function, and was fascinated by the idea of completely non-governmental/ unplanned solutions arising to address a problem that might otherwise be put by the wayside in a still-growing city – recycling – due to its profitability to a select group of people. Without a subset of people who personally benefit from recycling, it seems likely that Skopje would produce far more trash, unless a group of environmentally-conscious people made a giant push to get people to change their ways. I want to see what actually happens to the cardboard and plastic (the main consumer products recycled – I do not plan on investigating the recycling of industrial materials like metal, which I know is also a major part of this system) that is liberated from the trash – what recycling facilities process it and what kind of products they create from it.
The second issue of interest is the role this activity plays in the lives of those who undertake it. From what I understand, recycling is the main source of income for many people, but it does not seem to be an incredibly profitable endeavor. I want to investigate how much one can reasonably make off this process, and thus what an average income for a Roma family subsisting on recycling profits could be. I am interested in this because the Roma community has a complex relationship with the other communities in Skopje, and it feels like an incomplete exploration of Macedonian culture to not learn about this significant minority group within the city. The recycling process is beneficial to everyone involved – people who throw away the garbage, the city, the environment, and the recyclers – but how much of a difference does it really make for the main actors?

Project Description:

I plan to have several components to this project. The bulk of the work will be a research paper covering the questions I have asked above, and detailing research that I will do about the impact of the unofficial recycling system in Skopje. I will ask for support from my school for the research paper that I must produce as a senior-year requirement – I hope that I will be able to find contacts to question about the “recycling of recyclable things” portion of the project, and perhaps collect data about how big a difference this makes in the overall environmental impact of the city.
I would also like to augment this paper with photography illustrating the official and nonofficial means for recycling available to people in Skopje – I don’t want to erase the fact that there are bins for newspapers/paper available in some areas, but I would like to contrast their prevalence to that of the ever-present carts and trailers piled full of cardboard. I think photography can increase the interest created by this project by putting an image (perhaps even a face) to the facts.
Just as the photography may allow me to put a face on the facts, I will leave possibilities open as to how I will address the second issue in my project – perhaps I will include photography depicting the living conditions of the Roma community along with the photography of the actual act of recycling, and I may write about the other common sources of income amongst the Skopje Roma. Ideally, though, I wish to include a community service aspect to this project, by finding a way to regularly participate in a Roma-serving community group. There are opportunities through my school to work with Roma children. If this succeeds, I will additionally write an analysis of the experience to combine with the rest of my work.

Project Presentation:

In order to share this project, I will create a website, separate from my blog, dedicated to this project. Although I am personally interested in writing a well-researched essay and analysis of all aspects of this problem, I recognize that not everyone is willing to read research papers, especially if they are above a certain length – because of this, I will have the paper available in one portion of the website, but will post photos with smaller, more easily consumable bits of information in a visually appealing manner on the main part of the website. This way, I will be able to share (for free, since I’ll be using a blogging platform) my work easily on various social media sites and send it to my friends and family both in the United States and here.
Additionally, since I plan on studying Sustainable Development in college, I hope that this project, and the analysis of the interactions of people and materials in a continually growing city that it entails, will help give me a real-world context for what I will be studying. Since I will have peers interested in these same issues, I will also share my project with this audience and hopefully contribute to their understanding of the topic.

For New Years, the three YES Abroad students decided to spend our time in the freezing cold at and around a concert thrown by the Municipality of Centar, which is the center part of the city. It was way too cold to be there the whole time, so we popped into a restaurant and bought overpriced cheese sticks and soda (Team Газоза forever) until just a few minutes before New Years, when we ran back to the celebration and had a rather anticlimactic New Year. My biggest impression of New Year’s Eve was honestly just COLD.

I also got to go skiing (well, I didn’t really ski, more like watch others expertly navigate their way down a slope and ride over the mountains on a ski lift) with my host family in Mavrovo, a ski and snowboard center that was FULL of people excited about the first snow. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures, but this should give you a pretty good idea of what it all looks like!

Oooh, a big one – Orthodox Christmas, which is January 7th. I’m a bit iffy on the timeline, because what I wrote in my journal contradicts the calendar and the calendar contradicts what I can find online, but as far as I can remember, this is what went down: At around 4 or 5 AM the day before Christmas, kids come to people’s doors, sing a song, and receive money/candy/fruit (this is known as kolede). I was asleep for this, so no first-hand experience here. Then, in the evening of the 6th, I went with my host family to my host aunt’s house, which is in what I would call a “suburb” of Skopje – not one of the adjacent villages, but a part of the city that is almost entirely residential with stand-alone houses along streets. There, each street had a bonfire, where the neighbors stand and talk and eat food that’s been laid out on a table nearby. I practiced my Macedonian with extended family members, and did a little bit of dancing, and took pictures of the fire:

Another cool thing was that at one point, my host mom and I went to see the next block’s bonfire, and upon introducing me as American, the host quickly called out to someone to “bring over the American” – there was a young woman from South Carolina there, visiting Macedonia on her first time outside of the US to visit her boyfriend’s family! That was a really fun surprise.

On the 7th, we had a vegetarian-only lunch/dinner with traditional foods, and we split a piece of bread with a coin in it – whoever got the coin got luck for the next year. My host dad got it, for I believe the second year in a row!

After the holidays were over, but I was still on break, I dyed my hair half-blonde half-brown and then turned into a monster that sits in her room with books and emerges only to eat, shower, and freak out about exams. That, finally, is over, thank goodness, and I’m taking this weekend to figure out how to become active as an exchange student and combat the January blues.

That’s all for now! I’m hoping the next post will come a bit faster.