**Warning** This post will make you hungry. Do not read on empty stomach.
This should not be a surprise to anyone, but thetwinsontour are way far behind on these blogs. We were doing so good the first few days. But it’s impossible to keep up, especially when we spend so much time eating. Thetwinsontour have a new favorite food called Ayvar. It is available on Amazon for like $12 a jar. I wonder if there will be any Prime Day or Black Friday deals on Ayvar? Or if maybe Kohl’s will start carrying it at the checkout lane? They have a lot of ridiculous stuff there now. Not that there’s anything ridiculous about Ayvar. It’s just pure deliciousness. What is Ayvar? It’s a spread made from smoked red peppers and magic. It’s great on bread, cheese, or whatever else they serve it with. My favorite ayvar accessory is breadsticks– they are a great vessel for shoveling it into your mouth because you will look like a pig if you just use a spoon. Luckily, we had Ayvar at nearly every meal in Macedonia. Unfortunately, we didn’t have nearly enough days in Macedonia to feast on this delicacy.
Let’s see here, what else did we do in Macedonia besides eat yummy Ayvar? We bought a couple jars of it at the grocery store. (Note from the future, one of the jars leaked so it got left behind. The other jar is now secured shut with some green duct tape to ensure its safe arrival to Kansas.)
It is really rough to remember what we did after so many ayvar packed days. One of the highlights of Skopje was the old town area and Turkish bazaar. We walked around the old town area with a local guide named Snow White with Frida Kahlo eyebrows. I remember nothing. Much more memorable was eating a typical, local lunch. A group of us headed out during our free time for some lunch–but we let our tour manager guide us where to go. We went to a Kebab place. Now, in my mind’s eye, a Kebab is meat on a stick. Our guide ordered 50 kebabs. For 7 of us. Holy Guacamole. That’s a lot of kebabs. These kebabs were actually shaped like little sausages– but they taste way better than Jimmie Dean. Especially if you put them on bread. With the aforementioned delicacy Ayvar. Yummy, yummy in my tummy. We were all shoveling those kebabs, double fisted, into our mouths as fast as we could. Let me tell you, Joey Chestnut has nothing on the twinsontour when it comes to ayvar smothered kebabs.
Of course, the culinary delights did not stop here! No, sirree, Bob. Next up was coffee served in a coconut! This is obviously a very interesting concoction, especially for someone who only likes coconut in a piña colada. They gave us the extra coconut slices to eat (yeah– didn’t do that.) But, it was an iced coffee, and due to the coconut drinking vessel, it did not require any milk or sugar.
Enough about coffee– next stop was to buy some gourmet Turkish Delights. OMG– these were delicious–haven’t eaten them yet due to all the ayvar in our diet, so these will make it to Kansas. Note–that does not mean we are sharing.
Then we went to the bazaar area– it was a fruit and vegetable market. Our guide was really excited by this–he just kept exclaiming about how wonderful a place it was–as he was grabbing different varieties of grapes and handing them to us to sample. Yes. I ate unwashed grapes. Lots of them. And we didn’t buy any. No one scolded us, so I guess this is allowed, or maybe just tolerated. Like going to Costco on your lunch break for free samples. We only sampled grapes and nuts, though. Fruit was cheap. You could get like 3 kilos of apples for $2. Cheap! So, that was the bazaar.
After that, thetwinsontour wandered around on our own for some souvenir shopping. To buy things we didn’t know we wanted, but suddenly couldn’t live without. When buying silver filigree jewelry by weight, this could be quite dangerous. Luckily, we only wound up with one pair of earrings each.
On the way back to our hotel, we of course stopped for Gelato. thetwinsontour feel no day is complete without Gelato. But this is no surprise to you, dear reader. They had interesting flavors, like Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat. The only flavor sampled was TikTok, which was kind of like Rocky Road. All in all, it was tasty. And, it had been at least an hour since we had eaten, so we were obviously famished.
Oh boy, I have just waxed poetic for hours about food. And I didn’t even get to dinner. We were well and truly on our own for dinner. Luckily there was a whole row of restaurants lined up along the river, right by all the statue covered bridges. We took a few (okay, a lot) of nighttime selfies, and then headed to the restaurant we had decided on–Cafe Cubano. We sat down and looked around–there were only 2 customers with drinks only and the wait staff was busy moving all the chairs. As this did not seem promising and it was already the dinner hour, we headed to Plaza de Toros instead, which was a nice sounding Spanish restaurant. Despite the name, there was nothing Spanish about the menu. One dish had Spanish rice. That was it. We settled on chicken stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon. Then we waited. And waited. And waited some more. It took like an hour. We were so tired. Not to mention famished. Once we were finally served, we wasted no time chowing down on the delicious concoction. It was amazing for not Spanish Spanish food.
We passed by the aforementioned Cafe Cubano on the way back to our hotel (the only Marriott in Macedonia), and there were still very few people and no chairs. But there was salsa music. Seems they are a nightclub by night.
Anyways, that is a whole day about food. We ate. A lot. And it was good. And now my mom knows that we have eaten more than gas station candy bars. She worries you know.
Love,
thetwinsontour
So let’s try this. Instead of paying $48/year to load more photos, I am supposed to be able in embed a link from Flickr. Hopefully this works?
thetwinsontour 