Crossing over from Serbia on the bus, the local woman in front of me was confused about why we had to get off the bus and go through immigration controls twice.

“Well, the first is to leave Serbia, and the second one is to enter Macedonia,” I offered.

Nope. She’s not getting it. I loaned her my power bank so she could charge her dead AF phone, and this seemed to be enough to distract her from the bewildering world of international borders.

NORTH Macedonia. They seem really picky about the inclusion of the North part here, even though as far as I know there is no South Macedonia. I suppose the North does make it sound nicer. Though they might have considered “Macedonia Heights.”

Ahh, wait. Macedonia is the name of the entire geographical region, which includes parts of Greece, Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria and Kosovo. North Macedonia is the country that occupies the, you guessed it, northern part of that region. After North Macedonia left Yugoslavia, the country joined the UN in 1993 and wanted to be called Macedonia. But Greece had all kinds of problems with this, from fears that the name implied a claim on the northern regions of Greece (also called Macedonia) to Greece’s historical claim to the ancient kingdom of Macedonia (which overlapped both Greece and North Macedonia geographically, but mostly Greece), all the way to the sun symbol Macedonia wanted to use on their flag, which the Greeks claimed as part of their cultural history as well.

So from 1993 to 2018, the country was known as the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM, which I think is a better name anyway. “Where are you from?” “FYROM.” “...what.”

After years of sanctions imposed on FYROM by Greece and all sorts of other problems, in 2018 the two countries finally worked out their differences with an agreement that the country would forevermore be called North Macedonia, and the world went back to not knowing where the fuck that was.

I was on my way to the capital city of Skopje. I never, at any point, saw the name of this city spelled the same way twice anywhere. When I went to buy my bus ticket from Niš in Serbia to Skopje, I was working off the spelling of “Skokplje” and good luck pronouncing that. The ticket lady didn’t speak any English at all, and after my first disastrous attempt at pronouncing the town name, she said “...Belgrade?” which made me laugh pretty hard. We eventually worked it out by writing things down on a scrap of paper and passing it back and forth until we were both 20% sure we were talking about the same place.

Getting off the bus in Skфkplšjee or wherever the fuck I was, I fought my way through a mob of aggressive taxi drivers and assorted weirdos in front of the bus station and walked quickly through a somewhat desolate urban landscape that had me slightly concerned. But thankfully after I passed the mall and the freeway overpass things started to get nice and I was treated to pretty lights in the trees outside the empty cafes.

I turned a corner and GOOD CHRIST what is that??

There was an absolutely MASSIVE statue of a dude on a horse above a fountain. Before I had time to make sense of this, some kind of scam artist was trying to get my attention as he cycled through various languages and I pretended I didn’t understand any of them as I made a bee-line for the apartment I was renting from a nice local couple.

The apartment was inside a very old soviet-era building with a tiny and hilariously Soviet elevator.

Whew. I made it. To wherever I am.

That night I had a very strange experience. I drifted off into what I thought at the time was a dream. As one tends to do at night. But then I found myself somewhere I didn’t recognize, out far from any cities. I was busy. What am I doing? I was watching myself from the outside as I worked with the Earth. Down into the dirt and the boulders beneath the soil, way down, very busy, very busy. I knew exactly what I was doing at the time, but I was in another state of consciousness that doesn’t translate easily into the waking awareness. This went on for some time, until at some point I slipped into my regular waking consciousness.

I looked around. Oh my God, where am I? I was in the middle of nowhere. Awake. Oh shit. How am I going to get back to my apartment in Skopje? I felt a momentary sense of panic and then suddenly the landscape blurred around me, ground and trees and landmarks smearing by at incredible speed as I warped through space. Everything flew by for a few moments and then ZAP I was in my Skopje apartment.

What in the hell was that? I’d been having these kinds of experiences more and more in the last few years, where I’d suddenly wake up in the middle of the night and find myself somewhere else geographically, in the middle of doing something important that my waking mind didn’t quite understand, and then as I struggled to figure out how this could be possible, the scene around me would morph and shift and I’d find myself back home, fully awake, often standing in the middle of the room. Usually the “somewhere else” was the last place I had traveled to, and the only awareness I retained of what I’d been doing there was a sense of unfinished business, that I needed to finish up something energetically that I’d started when I had been there in the flesh.

As these experiences piled up and I became more used to them and less bewildered by them, I sometimes became aware of being in both places at the same time. Off in Japan or Yemen or wherever, and also in Minneapolis, simultaneously. I want to say it’s like watching two TVs set side by side, but it’s far weirder than that, as it’s like having your full conscious awareness of where you are, truly being there, and yet at the same time having full conscious awareness of another place at the same time, also being there, holding both in your mind in an uncertain balance, like you’re juggling.

What I experienced that night in Skopje was like those other experiences, only I had more conscious awareness and memory of what I’d been doing out there, and I experienced the return to where my body was in much more literal terms than I ever had before, as if I was physically moving through space, rather than having one place just melt into the other.

About an hour later I got a notification on my phone that there had just been a 5.5 earthquake 61 kilometers southwest of where I was sitting. Whoa. A chill ran up my spine.

The reason this was chilling to me is that a few months previous I had been at a meditation retreat in California, where a psychic friend told me she had a message for me from the Native American medicine man she sometimes channels. He wanted her to tell me that as I traveled around the world, one of the things I was doing, beyond my conscious awareness, was that I was helping the Earth shift build-up negative energies that otherwise would result in natural disasters and huge loss of life.

The Earth as a living being can only tolerate so much of the negative energy that mankind is constantly pumping out through our thoughts, emotions and actions, and once the Earth becomes overwhelmed, in order to survive it has to purge this energy through earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, etc. Violent natural forces successfully release and dissipate these energies, but as an unfortunate consequence, often end up killing a lot of people in the process. He said that my service and ability were to travel to the places where this energy had built up and help the Earth release it, so that specifically earthquakes would accomplish what the Earth needed them to, without leading to loss of life.

At the time this information was completely new to me and came entirely out of the blue. I didn’t know what to make of it, exactly. I knew intuitively that I was traveling to the places I was going for some higher spiritual purpose. And I knew that I had some kind of abilities when it came to shifting energies. And I was becoming more and more aware that heavy stuff was happening while I was asleep. But I had no idea what that heavy stuff was. And I hadn’t told this friend anything about any of this, she just knew that I traveled a lot.

I sort of filed this information away for further consideration, then a few weeks later I traveled to Jamaica for a week. A few days after I left, they had a large earthquake off the shore, off a section of the coast where I had been just swimming a few days before. Officials were baffled because an earthquake of that size should have created a tsunami that would have killed many people, but the tectonic plates had shifted in a very unusual way that had prevented a tsunami from forming.

Huh. OK then. I started to take this whole idea a lot more seriously.

And now here I was, later that same year, off doing SOMETHING down in the Earth some miles from Skopje in the middle of the night. And less than an hour later they had a large earthquake that resulted in no casualties. Maybe I had experienced the transition back to my body as if I was zipping along in a car because I had been so close to my physical body this time, instead of on the opposite side of the globe. 61 kilometers seemed just about right for the amount of space I had warped through on my way back to my body. Huh.

There’s a lot of confusion in the world right now, about where we’re headed, about where covid came from and what’s going on with the vaccine, etc. I find myself trying to straddle the line between two worlds, the mainstream world where covid came from a bat and the vaccine is a godsend, and another world where virtually all of the many spiritually-focused people I know believe what is coming from multiple channelled sources that have been right in the past, that covid was engineered by very dark people who are trying to maintain their hold on power by getting the public to take a vaccine designed to halt the human spiritual evolution that is shaking up their status quo.

On one hand, I’m amused by the thought that everyone I know who is reading this is thinking “That’s crazy!” but half are talking about one side of that divide and half are talking about the other.

On the other hand, I’m exhausted by all of this. Trying to keep your head on both sides of the looking glass is crazy-making. It’s easy enough to entertain all the ideas and allow for the possibility that this or that could be true. But then you have to make concrete decisions about things like taking the vaccine or not. What spiritually-focused person would take that risk, given all the warning signs? But what if it’s actually harmless, and what if it’s required for travel, and travel is your spiritual service? Exhausting.

I find the most peace when I simplify down to what I do have clarity on. From my own experience, I believe that the Earth is a living being is rising in vibration, up into a new realm that won’t look much like the life we’ve known before. And it’s time for people to wake up if they want to come along for that ride. Most won’t, I don’t think. Which is okay. They’re not ready and wouldn’t be comfortable in that higher world, it wouldn’t be right for them. I think they’ll reincarnate in their next life in a place more like the Earth has been in the past, to continue working on the kinds of lessons that environment is best suited to. I’m not sure how all of those people are going to physically exit the stage, if there are big natural disasters or more pandemics coming or what.

That idea of a chaotic mass exit makes me very sad, to be honest. I can see the inevitability of it, but I don’t want people to have to experience that trauma and fear, even if it is momentary. I’ve had vivid visions of cities in ruin that I really don’t want to re-experience in waking life. I think the work that I’m doing, unconsciously and now gradually more consciously, is about buying more time for people to make that personal choice about rising up with the Earth or not, and I think there are others out there doing the same, whether they’re conscious of it or not.

A part of me can’t wait for this chaotic and confusing transition period to be over. But a bigger part looks at all the time for self-reflection people experienced during the pandemic lockdowns and wonders how many changed the path they were on in that time, how many are awake and onboard for the big adventure now?

That was supposed to be the end of that chapter, but right after I wrote it, here in early May of 2021, I suddenly got very sleepy out of nowhere. I went and laid down and zonked out for about 20 minutes, into some intense inbetween space where I seemed to be integrating understandings about things that were brought up by my remembering of that earthquake experience. I woke up and something was different. Hmm.

Whoa! Gradually, my consciousness slipped into a rare place it hasn’t been in at least a year. I had one of the “enlightenment experiences” I’ve written about before, where I experience first-hand something of what I think my soul’s true consciousness is, when it’s not filtered through a limited mind and physical body while kicking it here on Earth.

Right before the surprise nap, I had sent an email about the trip to Iraq I have coming up next week. Suddenly, I started remembering the trip to Iraq. That I haven’t taken yet. This was very confusing. Am I experiencing an alternate dimension version of myself that has gone to Iraq already, while this “me” was off traveling somewhere else? Oh man. Uh-oh, had the email I’d just written made any sense at all, or was I telling the Iraqi tour guide dude all about alternate dimensions? I searched through my email for “Iraq” and found a sent message. Reading it… wait, this isn’t it. I don’t remember writing this. Was this from some previous attempt to go to Iraq? Last year? I checked the date and it was from that same night. Whoa. I was in such a different state of consciousness it was like I was reading something written by someone else entirely. I don't remember this. But I sure as shit remember Iraq.

Then my consciousness suddenly expanded further, like I was seeing from up above the specific perspective I had just been in. I could see that yes, I had already been to Iraq, because my entire life had already happened. I could see that the future had already occurred, all the places I was “going to” go to had happened. I could see it all. My awareness expanded again and I realized that I was still going to make choices in my life as time “moved forward,” but what I was choosing wasn’t really the events, which already existed. I was going to be choosing at what level of consciousness I experienced these events that had always existed in the absolute. I could experience them at just the physical and egoic mind level, like we normally do every day, or I could be aware of all the spiritual levels of things that were happening in the higher dimensions at the same time, like the energy work I was doing while my body I was asleep. My vision scoped out and out and I could see that all of my work with the Earth had already been a success. All the things I hadn’t done yet. This was trippy as all get out.

Awareness flooded in about all of the things I was doing simultaneous to this physical life, an entire existence in higher realms. The thing that was funny about this is that it became really, really hard to tell what I was or wasn’t normally aware of. Which parts of this information were new. It was all natural to me in that moment, nothing about it felt supernatural or extraordinary. I couldn’t remember exactly what my limited human consciousness was normally like, in what ways it was limited. The idea itself seemed silly. This is who I am, how could I be anything else? I had to logically infer that certain things weren’t normally a part of my awareness. OK, I’m standing in a field of pure light, experiencing the bliss of oneness with all creation. That’s probably new, lol.

As I saw my work with the Earth, I became instantly, matter-of-factly aware that I am much, much, much more powerful than who I believe I am in my daily life. And that my daily conception of myself was just something my soul was sort of humoring me about, a necessary costume to wear while you’re walking around on Earth, I guess. I could see that I wasn’t quite ready to believe in my true existence, my true abilities.

My higher self was just playing along until my mind was ready to accept it, like it was giving my human self a loving but almost-patronizingly patient pat on the head. “Sure, you’re just this dude, yep, that’s fine.”

At the level of awareness I was experiencing, of course I was doing these massive things with the Earth, it’s who I am and what I came here to do. It wasn’t any more grandiose than being aware that your body is made up of millions of atoms and cells working together in concert. It just was what it was, and denying it was impossible. From that level of awareness, my daily waking beliefs about myself were what was ridiculous.

The thing about this experience that impressed me the most was how long it lasted. I’ve been in this space of awareness before, where I could see these kinds of things, but it had never lasted for more than maybe 20 to 30 minutes before I came dramatically back down, as if from a drug trip. This time it went on for about two hours, until I consciously chose to end it so I could make something to eat without setting the kitchen on fire. And I don’t think that was a fluke, I was aware during the experience that this state of consciousness wasn’t a crazy outlier, it was who I am and that it was inevitable that I would return to it. There could be no other way.

At the same time that I was observing that my life had all already happened and that I had the choice of what level to experience the rest of it from, I saw, visually, that I was going to experience these states of expanded consciousness more and more frequently going forward, until I could bring them on at will. I felt the shape of an elongated crystal inside my forehead, and a tunnel leading back from this place to the seat of my conscious awareness deeper inside my brain. I quickly walked over and sat down with my crystal skull, and set the intention to anchor the experience I was having and to prepare my nervous system to experience it more often. My eyes began to flutter extremely rapidly just like they had inside the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid in Egypt, and I spent forty minutes holding the crystal skull and feeling things realign inside me, creating channels for this energy to flow through me without resistance or conflict.

Throughout the two-hour experience, I took some notes and sent my mom a few texts sharing what was happening, hoping all along that they didn’t come across as completely batshit crazy because I couldn’t tell if I was writing about things that hadn’t happened yet or not, from her perspective. I laughed a lot as realizations sparked in my mind. It’s funny to have spent energy wondering if you should go to Iraq or not, and then move into full awareness that you’ve already gone to Iraq, in the absolute. Time just hasn’t showed it to you yet. Well! I guess that answers that then.

I gradually became aware that what I was experiencing, as mind-blowing as it was, wasn’t even my full consciousness. It was like an in-between state, a way station my higher self had created so I could experience as much of this as was possible while still locked inside a physical brain. True awareness was way too huge for the brain to process, as I had experienced before. It feels like your cells are going to rip apart as you become aware of everything all at once, and intense, staggering nausea follows. A higher aspect of myself had found a way to help me step into this experience without instantly shitting the bed. Nice.

I could see that the nap I’d been suddenly prompted to take was my higher self tapping me on the shoulder, like “Psst. Check this shit out.” Remembering the earthquake experience in North Macedonia had tapped me into the level of awareness I touched that night, when I became consciously aware in the middle of doing the Earth work. And that thought process moved me away from my normal mental neighborhood of work and booking flights and how in the world they made so many seasons of ALF, and placed me in close enough proximity to this higher awareness that I could hop across the gap.

Now, it all feels much less far away. Even writing this, I feel the energy swell around me and I’m half-way there. I think going back and reading this later will have a similar effect. Can it work that way for anyone else? Interesting to wonder.

That night I had about 14 dreams in a row about cars, which is my dream symbol for ditching old ways of moving through life. In these dreams usually have at least four or five cars stashed around town that I forgot I owned. In one I was sitting on the wrong side of the car for the steering wheel, which was a nice travel-related touch, I thought.

The next morning I was working at my desk for a bit when I realized I forgot to make my bed. I went back into the bedroom and as I approached the bed, I could feel the energy of my dreams from the night before, like it was hanging in the air of the room. I started getting little snippets of images from the dreams. I leaned over the bed to straighten the sheets and suddenly ZAP I was back inside the dream for a few seconds. POP I was back in the room. Whoa… what the hell. OK, I’ve clearly opened up some new levels of energy sensitivity and awareness. This is going to be fun.

I guess this is its own chapter now, so I have time to tell another story that I realize now ties into all of this. I’m starting to see that I cleared the way for this connection to higher consciousness by clearing out some old, stuck energy from the past. After my Van Gogh experiences that I wrote about in my The Netherlands post, I started reading the new biography of Vincent Van Gogh that I mentioned then. I was completely blown away.

Because of my interest in reincarnation and previous experiences with contacting past lives, I’ve read a lot of biographies (believe it or not, I ended up not being most of those people! ha). But I’d never read one like this before, a book that managed to put you right into the subject’s head and in their heart. I’m sure having the hundreds of letters that Vincent and his brother Theo sent back and forth over their lifetimes helped a great deal with accomplishing this. I felt like reading it was the closest thing possible to having a crystal-clear window into what a past life was really like, in the first person. It felt like a miracle, honestly. A blessing.

It’s a very long book, and everything I read brings up all kinds of memories and energies, so I have to go slowly. Reading it has taken months.

It has also gone slowly because reading the book has grown more and more difficult as I’ve progressed through Vincent’s life. Because, frankly, Vincent was an asshole. No real way to sugarcoat that. He carried a woundedness seemingly since birth that he took out on everyone around him. Loving him never, ever went unpunished. He was delusional, thin-skinned, quick to anger, combative, utterly impossible to get along with and aggressively inconsiderate of other people. He directly caused the stroke that killed his father, so on-point was his asshole game. He got three different women pregnant and abandoned them all. One tried to kill herself. I’d always thought Vincent’s lack of commercial success in art was due to the world not being ready for his art. His art did break new ground, obviously, but I think it might have been accepted and celebrated during his lifetime if he hadn’t gone out of the way to insult every person he ever met. He was just a massive dick.

Reading all this has understandably not been easy. My biggest concern in life is how I treat other people. I feel bad for days if I accidentally cut someone off in traffic. I’ve had to train myself to be a little less considerate just to get through life, because it can be utterly paralyzing. My biggest fear in life is of being oblivious and not aware of myself and my effect on other people, which is kind of funny because I’m about as self-conscious as they come. So if you were to ask me what my worst nightmare is, I’d tell you it would be finding out I had been a human wrecking ball who spent 37 years making everyone around him miserable. Uh-oh.

On the bright side, this makes kind of hilarious the inevitable argument of “Oh you just believe in this because it boosts your ego to think you were someone famous.” NOPE. I would pay cash money not to have been this guy. Fucking-A. What a dick.

But… I remember what I remember, and I’ve experienced what I’ve experienced. Reading about his life in detail has only cemented all the fine details that line up with my life so eerily. Very, very specific and unusual things I've done that were repeats from that life. I could see, in Vincent, my own inner tendencies taken to the furthest extreme. Yeeish, I don’t think I’m getting off the hook for this one. Shit.

I’ve always figured we don’t remember our past lives because we’ve all probably killed somebody at some point in a past life, and we’d feel terrible about that if we remembered. Turns out I was right, only 37 years of being a massive prick to everybody feels even worse than knocking off some hobo on a bender.

I was recently in Tanzania, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, and I had a lot of downtime on the way up the mountain because I was taking the long route. Every day you get up early and climb for several hours, then rest in your tent all afternoon until dinner time, and early to bed. So there I was, reading the book, and reading about Vincent making the same terrible mistakes over and over and over again. Burning every bridge. Setting every opportunity on fire and only pissing it out when nothing but ashes were left. Oh God. This is killing me. My mind raced for alternative explanations.

Reading Theo and Vincent’s letters and arguments, I related much more to Theo. He was always right. Vincent was always delusional, and you could always see the train coming around the corner, about to crash into Vincent like he was Wile E. Coyote. Wait… maybe I was Theo! Yeah I like that idea better. Theo’s experience with Vincent reminded me of friendships and family relationships I’ve been in with difficult loved ones who were impossible to find harmony with. Yeah, maybe… no. It sank in. I wasn’t Theo. I was Vincent. I was the asshole. I’ve had these difficult relationships in this life so I could experience what it was like to love Vincent. It’s karma. Shit.

The reading got so difficult, day by day, that it began to feel like the book was part of the mountain I was climbing, taking more willpower every day as I climbed higher in altitude and the air grew thinner and harder to breathe. I reached the summit of Kilimanjaro on the same day I reached the exact midpoint of the book.

It’s all downhill from here.

I’m still reading the book now, day by day. And, I think, making peace as I go. I’ve felt very judgmental of Vincent at times, of course. But I realize the point of all of this is for me to see clearly what happened and accept, and embrace everyone involved with love, including Vincent. To forgive him. I don’t know where his woundedness came from, if it was from some experience in a previous life or what. My own extreme self-consciousness and fear of being unaware makes sense to me now as a direct reaction to that life, making goddamned sure this time around I didn’t make the same mistakes again. I’ve gradually been able to accept that I, Sean, am not responsible for the things Vincent did, even if I am helping my soul balance those energies in his life. And I keep reading, moving from judgment to acceptance, over and over again.

I think this long act of service has gradually cleared the stuck energy from Vincent's life that’s been there since the 1800s, just like the negative energy I’m transmuting from inside the Earth. Maybe it’s the actual emotional energy from those events in his life. Maybe it’s guilt. Clearing it piece by piece, I’ve been creating a clarity in my soul and energetic field that I’m starting to experience the benefits from, as I discover that these higher states of being are waiting for me, in closer proximity than I ever imagined.

In the morning, Skopje looked generally less sketchy than it had the night before, and I realized the giant fountain statue was of Alexander the Great. Oh, duh.

In my defense, that shit is 72 feet high and is so huge you can’t really see what it is unless you’re pretty far away from it. And it isn’t actually Alexander the Great.

I mean it is. Wait, no it isn’t! How dare you say that?? Wink wink. Since North Macedonia can’t go to the bathroom or appropriate a massive piece of Greek history without pissing off Greece, building a gigantic statue of A the G was bound to cause problems. Alexander was the king of Macedonia (then) which is in Greece (now) and he was born in the Greek city of Pella, spoke Greek and was of Greek ancestry. Then he went on to take over the entire world and kill a bunch of people who were just minding their own business so of course two countries are now fighting bitterly over claiming him as one of their own.

Honestly, Greece comes across as a bit of an asshole in this story, since North Macedonia slots in as the plucky little underdog you’ve never heard of before. Though to be fair, the people of North Macedonia are Slavic in origin, so it is a bit of a stretch to claim Alexander the Great and the ancient kingdom of Macedonia as their own heritage. It’s a bit like if somebody new moved into your house and refused to take down your bowling trophies. Come on, man! I was the one who bowled that 107 and earned that participation trophy!

The whole statue thing got wrapped up into Greece blocking North Macedonia from joining the EU, so North Macedonia changed the name of the statue to “Equestrian Warrior.” Nope, I’m not kidding. I thought they were going to rename it “North Alexander the Great” so points for zagging when I expected you to zig, N.M..

But seriously, it’s Alexander the Great.

The statue was built as part of the government’s Skopje 2014 initiative, which saw the very poor country spending many millions to build a ton of statues and make Skopje not look like the drab Soviet bunker it had been ever since being flattened by an earthquake in 1963.

And by a ton of statues, I mean a MOTHERLOVING FUCKTON of statues. Skopje has more statues than, oh I don’t know, America has guns or Serbia has decorative skulls or France has withering glares if you ask for something without cheese on it.

Skopje basically looks like Medusa parachuted in out of the blue one day and was like “Wassaaaaap bitches?” And everyone said “Wuh- Oh goddammit I’m a statue now you asshole.” And they were right. Skydiving Medusa is the dirt worst.

I’m going to show you a lot of statue photos here but I want you to remember that I only took photos of about one out of every ten statues and I’m only sharing about 10% of the statue photos I took because oh my God, so many statues.

After an hour in Skopje I realized that everyone who has ever been to Macedonia gets a statue made of them. I wondered what mine would look like.

Wait… does anybody leave Macedonia? I scanned the faces of the statues, looking for signs that they might be visitors who had been turned to stone by the local water or Burger King.

The locals generally seem to roll their eyes at all the statues, since they were built by the conservative nationalist government and are seen as a propaganda tool, which cost a lot of money the country couldn’t really afford. Many are in support of tearing down at least the not-Alexander statue, except that would cost yet more millions.

As part of the dispute with Greece and North Macedonia’s desire to join the EU, at one point plaques were added to the most controversial statues, explaining that they were depicting Hellenistic (Greek) history. This seemed to inflame a population that previously couldn’t have given two shits about the statues, but the constant bullying from Greece clearly pissed people off and many of these plaques were vandalized or stolen.

Anyway, here are just a preposterous number of other statutes.

On my way out of town I saw them beginning work on my statute. It was of me walking around Skopje, looking confused. They were doing a really good job. I really looked bewildered at why there were so many statues.

The historical figure that Skopje can claim without controversy is Mother Teresa, the Catholic nun who won the Nobel Prize and was declared a saint by the Church in 2003 for her work among the poorest of the poor in India. She was born in Skopje in 1910 and… well, she was ethnically Albanian so Albania claims her too but that’s not important right now. Not far from the giant statue of not-Alexander the Great, sits an empty spot where a house once stood, where Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born. That was her actual name, which is why they called her Mother Teresa, because nobody could pronounce that shit.

A bit further down the road you have the Memorial House of Mother Teresa, a museum dedicated to the boxer Leon Spinks- I’m kidding. This funky building was erected on the site of the former church where Mother Teresa was baptized.

I’m just now, as I write this, realizing that all of these things were located on the former locations of buildings that are no longer there because that earthquake in the 60s knocked every damned thing down. Oh yeeeeeah.

Inside the museum, there’s a mix of M.T. artifacts and collectables, like her rosary, her… bed?

OK. Her favorite selfie...

And most striking of all, her soul encased in wax.

GAH! I stood there, willing it not to blink. Man, she was a little lady. Don’t blink, little lady! Don’t blink!

Upstairs, there was a little glassy chapel that I wandered into and then was kicked out of.

One of my favorite things about Skopje is that there were little plaques with Mother Teresa quotes on them scattered around town in random places.

Mother Teresa’s an interesting figure because she’s of course venerated by Catholics, and has become sort of shorthand worldwide for “selfless charitable figure” in the same way Einstein means “smart guy” and Bill Gates means “revenge of the feeb you pantsed in the third grade.” But she’s also been heavily criticised by academics and figures like the late author Christopher Hitchens, who opposed Mother Teresa’s canonization on the grounds that her dedication was to spreading Catholicism, not alleviating poverty. Others have criticised the hospices she built for their lack of true medical care in spite of receiving millions of dollars in donations, and their refusal to administer painkillers, as Teresa viewed suffering itself as a Christ-like virtue.

I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but I find the process fascinating when a human being who was alive during my lifetime gradually transforms into a historical figure, and the seemingly random factors that will weigh into how her story is told and what she means to future generations, as everyone’s life is inevitably oversimplified and turned into a cartoon.

What else you got, Skopje?

As I wandered through the streets of Skopje, I noticed that people were looking at me weird. Which isn’t unusual at all, but I suddenly realized in this case it was specifically because I had been singing “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake. Out loud. At full volume. Oh man, maybe I’ve been traveling by myself for too long. This started in Lisbon, when I realized I was getting weird looks because I was singing “He Needs Me” from the movie Popeye out loud, which had been stuck in my head ever since I visited Popeye Village in Malta. This had continued with me walking around Barcelona singing “Thriller” on Halloween. This is either a sign that I’ve become admirably unconcerned with what other people think, or that I’ve been away from home for way too long. Possibly both.

So, Skopje. You’ve got some weird steampunk architecture and a fleet of all-yellow vehicles? That’s cool man.

A street where all the windows are decorated with dioramas depicting famous movies? Very cool.

Skopje also has an ancient bazaar, which was suitably bizarre.

Across town, I found an improbable vegan restaurant that was adorable for the fact that no one in the family who ran the place spoke any English at all, and one of the customers had to translate my entire order, which was actually a lot of fun. Down the street there was a cool church.

I saw on the map that Skopje apparently had some kind of Central Park, so I set off on foot across town to check this out. On the way I passed some kind of soccer arena that had some kind of Circuit City-style electronics store built right into it, which I found amusing.

Inside the park there was a playground decorated with figures from Alice in Wonderland cut out of sheet metal. You don’t see that every day!

Deeper into the very large park, North Macedonia’s fall colors were out in full splendor.

Nice job, Skopje. It’s not always easy to pull off weird and pretty at the same time, but you nailed it.

Before I knew it, I was on a bus and off to Ohrid, a city in southwestern North Macedonia (that’s weird to type) that’s perched on the shores of Lake Ohrid, a large lake that straddles the border with Albania.

I’d been told this was the prettiest part of NoMac (I just made that nickname up), though arriving in the evening and the fast-encroaching dark, I had to make do with the pretty lake view from my hotel room’s balcony...

As well as the weird shit I was able to stumble across as I wandered around, looking for something vegan to eat.

In the morning daylight, the prettiness was delivered as promised.

The big thing to do in Ohrid is to hike up to the Church of St John at Kaneo, a very small 13th century church that is mostly famous for being located in a very photogenic spot on a cliff above Lake Ohrid, if I can call anything in the eighth-largest city in North Macedonia famous with a completely straight face.

To get there, you wander through a maze of city streets and alleyways until you reach the shores of the lake, where you alight a wooden boardwalk which juts out over the lake, which is pretty and a lot of fun and has no safety features whatsoever.

Eventually you turn inland and climb up, up, up the cliffs until you reach the gates of the church.

The church itself isn’t anything really special, but... come on, that view!

I hiked further up the cliffs until I realized there was nothing up there and the church view really was the star of this show. I made my way back down and spent a long time meditating on the cliff as the panorama around me gradually turned to twilight and the beautiful sunset began.

The quirky lanterns around the church began to light up and I realized I was going to need to find my way all the way back to my hotel in the dark. Time to go!

This was a great choice, because the dying embers of the sunset looked fantastic from the varying landscapes along the shores of the lake.

Photogenic silhouetted fishermen made their way to the shore by the dying light of the sun.

Crossing the weird sketchy boardwalk over the lake was even more fun in the growing dark.

And the same odd lanterns from the church guided me through the dark and narrow alleyways of Ohrid, as stray dogs barked questioningly from the zigzagging streets up over my head.

Ah, that was nice. Thanks, North Macedonia. It’s been a very pleasant visi- Oh wait! I almost forgot the Yugos! Play us off, Hot Butter’s Popcorn!

In the morning I was be off to be left for dead at the crossroads in the middle of nowhere, and then on a strange taxi voyage all the way to and across Albania. But none of these troubles could wipe the smile off my face, courtesy of the Sexy Smile Centar...