So, Macedonia, take two. I was lucky enough to visit Skopje completely free of charge last week, and it made for a pretty interesting few days.

Skopje was a very strange city. Since the break-up of Yugoslavia, the Macedonians have been going about constructing a sense of national identity; they’ve chosen to do this through the curious method of building statues and monuments wherever possible, and revamping Skopje city centre to look more like a central European capital. The statue of Alexander the Great on horseback in the main square, which looks like it could well have been there for a few decades, has in fact only been there for a month. Just down the road, they’re also building a bizarre copy of the Arc D’Triumph - assumedly an Eiffel Tower replica is just a few short years away…

The Macedonians themselves were, on the whole, quite a grumpy bunch. Which is perhaps understandable, since my Macedonian language abilities are essentially non-existent, and we soon found out that as soon as you leave the confines of the city centre, people speak very little English. There’s also a sizeable Albanian population, as we discovered when we wandered into the midst of what we later learned were Albanian Independence Day celebrations. Think kids letting off fireworks from their hands, seven-year-olds whizzing around the streets on motorcycles, and militant looking crowds marching up and down streets chanting. All undeniably safe stuff.

 On the plane back, we had the ‘pleasure’ of the company of a large group of Greek PAOK fans, heading to the Europa League game at Tottenham. These guys conformed admirably to the hooligan model pioneered by the English: smoking in the toilets, shouting at the cabin staff, groping the air hostesses. They also had an apparent inability to sit down on an aeroplane; it took them 45 minutes to manage it before take-off, and as soon as we were in the air, they were up and meandering about again.

So, that made for a fun journey back!

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