Yesterday was a very busy day. In the morning, Ali had a very interesting meeting with an enthusiastic bunch of young people who work with the Youth Cultural Centre (MKC in North Macedonian), based in Bitola.

The people in MKC were very interested in Ali's tour and what it was all about, as their work also mainly deals with promoting understanding between different ethnicities and promoting cultural achievements.

They are currently working on an interesting event called Bitola Open City, which opens next month. Young people from all over the world will come and preform for the citizens of  Bitola, and show what can be achieved with goodwill and understanding.

The arts and culture events are free and open to everyone.

MKC also stages interesting workshops and camps. This year there will be six of them, three in Bitola, one in Demir Hissar, one in Ohrid and one in Tetovo. They will help with rebuilding some historical objects, run art camps and so on.

Participants will come from South Korea, US, Canada, nearly all of Europe, Russia and beyond.

Ali was very interested and promised that he and his friends from Bahrain will come next year and support the Youth Centre and maybe run some of the camps.

For further info on the work of the MKC and how to volunteer, their website is www.mkcbt.org.mk. Anyone  interested can contact the Director  at [email protected] or the Coordinator for the volunteer groups at [email protected]

After this meeting, we headed to the region of Prespa and the Prespa lake. We visited the village of Brajchino, where people can enjoy the traditional  North Macedonian hospitality and excellent trekking trails up N P Pelister. (More details at www.brajchino.com).

We visited some more villages in the region and took lesser known roads over Galichica mountain and National Park. Once at the top you can see both Prespa and Ohrid lake, with Albania and Greece in the distance.

We visited Sv Naum Monastery, had a pleasant lunch at the source of the Black Drim river which runs into the Ohrid Lake at Sv Naum and exit the lake at Struga town. For more info on Ohrid, visit www.ohrid.com.mk .

For lovers of classical music, the town hosts the Ohrid Summer Festival. This year one of the guests will be top violinist Sara Chang. Info for the festival can be found at www.ohridsummer.com.mk.

Valentina Miskovska-Petrovich