Лријатно Америка, добре дојдовте Република Македонија...

This is without a doubt the most excited I’ve been since the summer I was 16, about to head off to Nice, France, tabula rasa, not knowing what in the world I’d expect from Europe, without the slightest idea what I'd be encountering once off the plane.

Except this time, I’m not going to study a language in a commonly visited country for the month of July, I’m going to learn two languages and then work in an NGO in a "remote" one until nearly 2010. In Macedonia…my mind is still incapable of envisioning life in Macedonia!

The other day I started reviewing the basics of the Macedonian and Albanian languages, as requested. The Cyrillic alphabet is a trip! Although not as complicated as Arabic, many of the letters are “false friends” for a writer/reader of our Latin alphabet. Their B is our V, their 3 is our Z, an “inverse” N (и) is our I, their H is our N, their P is our R, their X is our H, etc! But at last, I am now reading all these Cyrillic songs I have on my IPod correctly, which until last week were just a bunch of symbols I’d ask my Mongolian friend Ugie to interpret. My first Macedonian word, авион, pronounced avion, was an immediate relief as it is the same word in French and Spanish! My second Macedonian word is љубов, love, pronounced lyubov, just like in Russian!

Moral of the story? I am going out of my mind in anticipation; I cannot sleep or even focus, every morning I wake up at the crack of dawn because my mind races as soon as it attains consciousness. Five weeks is just enough time to prepare, pick and choose my belongings for packing purposes, process my second passport and Macedonian visa, and say the inevitable goodbyes. Goodbye New York, goodbye to Jersey and the rest of America, à bientôt all of my dear family and friends. At least until early spring, I’ll be living one of those exhilarating transitional adventures. They always leave me feeling more awake than ever in my life, my observations more astute, every day faced with challenges to overcome, lessons and language nuances to learn, new people and places to get to know. That’s what I love about traveling the world, I suppose.

September 20: Arrival in Georgetown, Washington D.C. for staging.
September 23: Flight from Fairfax, Virginia to Vienna, Austria! From Vienna, we fly to Skopje, Macedonia. The first three months, we all live with host families near Veles, for language and professional training.
December 14: I’ll head off to a mystery town, working in a mystery NGO, for two years!