Escape to myself

I’ve just taken a long walk through the city. Now I’m sitting in a cafe with coffee and baklava pretentiously reading L’Etranger. But in fact I don’t feel pretentious; rather I feel a little as if I’m finding more of myself. I’ve come to Camus a little late in life but he seems to be making concrete something half-known. The Outsider epitomises the way I feel about life, the world and my place in it. I said the other day I felt disconnected… I don’t think it’s the travelling but my usual state of being. Listening to the children drumming on tin cans and begging on the bridge; watching tourists treat them as a photographic opportunity gave me a profound sense of helplessness in the face of a universe so unaware of us. Towards the end of the book Camus writes: “je m’ouvrai pour la premier fois la tendre indifference du monde.” Today I think I really felt that revelation instead of just knowing it. And the sun beats down as I sit amidst conversations in many languages I don’t understand realising how often I don’t understand what happens around me.

Skopje

Devastated by the 1963 earthquake Skopje is a city trying find it’s place in a modern world and establish itself as a capital while still maintaining a pride in it’s history. A city of grand projects, new civic buildings and reconstructed historical sites. It is also a city of mammoth statues. It maybe not always in my taste; much is in a bastardised neo classical genre, but it is nonetheless imposing.

The Turkish Bazaar is still a pattern of old streets with some older buildings: mosques, bath houses and a church situated below the fortress, a bastion since the Byzantine emperor Justinian’s era and subsequently developed by the Ottomans. It is hard to think that the country was under Ottoman rule until 1912.