Where's Lowes when you need it??

Yesterday I had a truly Macedonian experience. One of my national colleagues asked me to join him in some errand running so we could have needed conversations. I got in the car and he said we were going to buy glue. Not the Elmer's type but the big bucket type to use on posters that will be hanging up around the city for the upcoming Easter concert.

Off we went - driving through the city and into the unknown for me. We finally arrived at a gated entrance. He told the man behind the window 'commercial' and the gate opened and we parked in a very barren parking lot. My co-worker told me that this company was one of the largest and most lucrative companies in Yugoslavia. But after the fall of socialiam and bad managment it is now not a very impressive sight to behold. Grass in need of mowing and trees in need of trimming filled the green space between the parking and our needed building.

Luckily, my colleague knew where he was going and we entered one building, and headed up the stairs, a woman stopped us to check on where we were going, she nodded to our response and we continued on our way to an empty hallway with many closed doors along the way. We knocked and entered one door to find one man sitting behind an archaic computer. We told him our needs and after some exchange and hunting through past order books and other conversation we placed the order and paid...about 15 minutes later we were back in the car and headed to another gated entrance. An older man in a little guard shack came out and opened the gate and we began our journey through this mostly desserted, very large, very old factory. We eventually arrived at a bulding with an opened door which we entered and found an office - walls covered with past national heros and a little old thin man behind a desk. He came out and we headed to yet another door ...he went into a side room and came out with 2 large buckets of glue which might of weighed more than he. We loaded them up and headed back to his office to get the invoice. We then found our way back through the maze of rundown buildings to the gated entrance. There we stopped and had to have our buckets of glue weighed before we could leave. Yes, we had to take the buckets back out of the car and have them weighed before we could be on our way... So over an hour later, we were headed back to the city.

As I took in this whole experience, I just thought how much we take Lowes and Home Depots and other one stop shopping types of places for granted and how shopping for even something a bit more unusual, like a bucket of glue, is still a fairly easy 15 minute errand of in and out and on your way. Here it is a take a friend and enjoy conversation errand as you make your way through a maze of buildings, gates and doors to come out with your 2 buckets of glue.

Life here isn't always smooth or easy but I think the relationships built along the way are priceless.