Swedish Nerd Vs. The World

Macedonia was recommended by my friend Lisa who had lived there for a year to work as a volunteer for childrens rights and to help Roma children with education. I didn't believe her that Macedonia could be a nice place so I had much doubt when me and my friend Pär bought a cheap flight ticket to the capital Skopje. Lisa had left Skopje by then so we couldn't meet up with her unfortunately, but she told me about some places I should visit, like the Absinthe Bar. We arrived in Skopje an extremely cold day and all I wanted was to get to the five star luxurious spa hotel to be able to change clothes and dress warmer. It was a fun feeling to be able to stay at a five star hotel for the first time in my life because of the prices in Macedonia being so much cheaper, for once I was rich!  Oddly enough the luxurious hotel was located in the old parts of Skopje which seems as the most poor area. There is a smell of burning wood in the air and I guess that they still keep warm...

The only thing that comes to mind when I think of Kosovo is war. And it's debatable if it's even a country since its independence is agreed by only a bit more than half of the nations in the UN. Serbia still sees Kosovo as it's territory and right before me and my friend Michael went there for a road trip Serbia sent a train to Kosovo with a loud message about this on the outside of the train. "Kosovo Is Serbia" was written in 21 languages on the train and I was afraid that this was a start of a new war between the countries. Me and Michael came from Macedonia by car and already in the customs to Kosovo I was both excited and scared of what was waiting for us. The roads were very poor and since they were falling apart on the sides you had to drive close to the oncoming traffic to still stay on the road. It's not often that you get happy that you survived every encounter with a car heading in the different direction. One time we went the wrong way and drove o...

When me and my friend Michael rented the car in Macedonia to go to Albania we were like “we don’t need a GPS, it’s OK, we got a map”, but the salesperson gave it to us for free anyway like “trust me, you will need this”. At the same time he warned us not to stare us blind at the GPS because sometimes the roads just end and there will be a cliff without any warnings. With this in mind we entered Albania from Kosovo and since we heard a lot of bad stuff about the roads in Albania we were amazed how good they were, it had been much worse in Kosovo so it was actually a relief to be on a normal road again. All was good until the GPS suddenly said “follow the road to the ferry” and we got a bit suspicious. We arrived at the dock but we were the only ones there and it didn’t feel right at all that we were supposed to go on a ferry. I tried to speak with the gentleman running the ferries but he didn’t understand English and when I told him that we were going to Shkodër he was just saying ...