Aug 8th, Skopje Millenium Cross

8/8       Thursday

We want to go up the mountain to the Millennium Cross today, but we don’t know where the bus will stop. We decide to walk up the road towards the cross and see if we can find a bus on the way. It’s pretty hot out today, we’re looking forward to getting up on the peak. We notice that there’s very little traffic, and some of the shops are closed. There must be some kind of holiday going on. We’ll have to look it up later. Our plan works, and we don’t have to walk too far up the hill before we see a pull-over for a bus, and then the bus comes right along! We take a real switch-back ride up the mountain, which is a lot steeper than it looks. There’s a rugged path going up, and also some stairs that look like they’ll get you there, but we have no interest in tackling this hill. The bus stops at a nice park about halfway up, with a gondola ride to get the rest of the way to the cross.

The gondola tickets cost us a great big $6 for the two of us. Any gondola in the US would be about $15 each. We have a nice, scenic ride to the top. The giant Millennium Cross is a nice site from the city when it’s all lit up at night. Up close, it’s a little less impressive, a great metal scaffolding that we can’t climb. There is a plaza and snack shop at the peak, though. We can walk around for a 360 view of Skopje and the surrounding valley. We have a clear day, so we can see all the mountain ridges circling the river valley.

We enjoy the peak views for an hour or so, then take our gondola back to a bus. We get a double-decker bus, and sit at the front seats on top so the ride down the steep, winding road is extra fun.

Everything is still more or less shut down. Apparently, there’s a workers’ holiday to coincide with the ending day of Ramadan. It’s really strange to walk around a national capital city that’s closed. We can’t accomplish much between the heat and the holiday, so we go into the quiet mall and find the movie theater open, as we suspected. We  kick back and watch the gigantic rock-em sock-em robots fighting the gigantic underwater alien earth destroying creatures. Surprisingly, we are the only ones in the theater.

1 Video Included

 Skopje Millenium Cross