I'm not sure why my mind keeps returning to the everyday neighborhoods of Skopje that I walked though, had coffee in, stopped for groceries, etc.
Perhaps it was that it was my last context with civilization as among the civilized, as after that was a remote apartment in the mountains of Bulgaria (off-season resort), and then the crash into the city and the resumption of the struggle to survive in the urban gulag on very difficult terms.
But what I'm savoring isn't the coffee or the groceries, but the fact that every encounter, every transaction, every cup of coffee was within a civilizational context. It wasn't simply the market and franchise employees in their uniforms, but people transacting according to a way of life they thought right, and prepared to act against injustice when it appeared. (And there's certainly been no shortage of corruption in some of those areas.)
It's very difficult to describe, but it did give hope that a place like that might exist, and some work might be done there.
But then to the mountains, which were essential almost holy, but nothing to do with the civilization or the culture, and then to the city of the power of evil, my home of many, many years -- and the present impasse.