First Day at Work

Glorious day for Monday morning! This is the first day at my work site and what better way to start than with my usual morning walk. I returned home at 8 am. After a breakfast of coffee, cereal with flax seeds and dried cranberries, I walked to work. Have I told everyone that work is less than 5 minutes away and I can see the building from the gate of my house? This is the kind of work commute I have dreamed about many times, especially when during my early days of working in downtown Chicago, I had an hour-long commute by train.
The group I sit with were there drinking coffee when I arrived at 8:45am, giving me enough time for socializing and skipping the actual cup of coffee. I had been warned there would be more coffee during the day. I offered chocolates as this was my first day at work and it is a Macedonian tradition to share one’s good fortune with everyone.
After about 15 minutes, I accompanied one of the workers whose job is to record encroachments on the streets and other public spaces in one section of the city. The city is divided into three sections. They walk to and through their areas and I went with the English speaking one who monitors the area that includes the original village before it grew into a city and is the farthest from the office. These streets were paved about 5-6 years ago with the ‘stone-brick’ material and not the usual asphalt we see today, giving it a picturesque look. There are still many homes made of the mixed clay and hay brick with a stone and wood frame construction. The homes are not laid out in the modern geometrical fashion and so offer many fascinating angles to the street.
His job was like officer friendly and he spoke of the encroachments in a neighborly fashion and no resident was given a citation. Some areas had been cleared of the encroachment since his last round. Surprisingly many homes that we crossed had still not demolished the old outhouse structures, though each home is equipped with indoor plumbing. It is my understanding that outhouses are built, understandably during the construction of the home and have to be taken down upon completion. There is no manpower to enforce the demolition and they end up staying as eyesores.
We also stopped for coffee with one of the residents, who had remodeled his house fairly recently with a modern paver stone driveway. His patch of garden, approx 15 square feet, has a little section planted with salad greens. Using twigs and plastic to form a greenhouse, he had enough to sell some heads for cash income. The remainder of his garden was tilled ready for the next crop, with the exception of a corner, also covered with an even smaller greenhouse about 1 sq ft filled with cilantro and/or parsley. Two and half hours later, we stopped at a fresh bakery near the high school on our way back to the office and I picked up fresh bread and some “burek” for lunch. It was a great way to meet many residents of the city, see it with a colleague and observe one of the ways the municipality works.
Afternoon was a little slow and I was a bit tired having walked before work and during work all morning. I spent the remainder of the time at the computer using google translate to read some of the Macedonian documents. We had another “pausa” (break) at 2 pm and soon it was time to go home.
I did some more laundry, sort of with the idea that if I do a little everyday, I will not have a pile of clothes for the weekend. I had to wash my nice pants as they had picked up mud during my walks. Dinner, de facto became left over burek, an apple and a banana topped with a cup of coffee. I spend another hour on language, transferring my scribbles during the day in a coherent fashion in a new notebook I had purchased and preparing for the tutorial for the next day.