Juan Sarazá Canflanca

It was crazy that year, I think the highest temperatures in the last three hundred years in Italy (I’m not exaggerating), so hot locals were not using ovens and they were cooking pizza in the open air (I may be exaggerating a tiny bit). I remember not enjoying Florence that much because it was just too hot, although I went back there nine years later and got a totally different opinion, of course. We loved the towns (and, let’s face it, the food) so much that when my parents asked my siblings and me, after three weeks of intense travelling, if we wanted to go to Rome or go home, there was no hesitation. In Paris, by the way, we met two cousins (from Denmark and from Australia) who did part of the trip with us, came to my hometown a few months later and whom I later met, several years later, in their respective countries.

The town was an hour and a half from Ohrid by bus, which I could take early enough to not feel I was wasting time in the morning but late enough to have a good night’s sleep. I mean, of course I may have missed one or ten things, but I got the feeling that this small town is basically the ruins I mentioned, the lively main street, where my hostel was, and the bazaar, which was much less touristic than the one in Skopje and oriented towards locals, with a market whose stalls were full of nicely arranged colorful vegetables. A shady website said 15.00, a piece of paper on the window of the building that acted as bus station said 16.30 and the woman who rented me the apartment, after a phone consultation, agreed with the piece of paper. After that, I went to a nearby lake and existed for a couple of hours before I had a pizza in the village and went to the bus stop.

Poor people know they can go to Europe on foot and enter Melilla, where associations like Cruz Roja [Red Cross] or Caritas can help you find a place where you can at least breathe in peace. If you’re not fluent, it’s very difficult; that’s why I’m studying Law at a university in London in English, which is my mother tongue. It’s what I like the most because I’m in a place where I can see a lot of people. [When we thought the interview was over, the shameful image of the lonely funeral of his mother fuels Howard’s need to continue telling things.

The ones I saw are the Church of Saint Sophia, the Church of Saint Clemens and Panteleimon and the Church of Saint John. By the time I got to that church, I had already seen the remains of the old Hellenistic style theatre and I had met three young people (a guy from Georgia and two girls from Romania) who made my afternoon more colourful. It’s probably worth to check it out if you go there since it’s only six minutes on foot from the Church of Saint Sophia and seven from the Church of Saint Clemens. Ohrid is 695 metres around sea level and, since the hike was supposed to take almost four hours, that meant it would probably not be so steep.