It was the green, green mountains on the approach to the airport that first gave it away. Then finding that there was more history here than I'd given it credit for - significantly more than the twenty years that I was expecting. Then that flag. Best flag in the world? Almost certainly. It looks like a child designed it. 
We're in Skopje at the moment. I'm not going to lie, I was expecting weird but in a tolerable way. I was wrong, not much weird at all - only about as weird as a Rotterdam. The only real weird is some of the statues they've got and the shiny planters in the river, but you get the impression that they're deliberately, quirkily weird, rather than 'donkey in a bus shelter' weird. They're currently going through an unnecessarily ambitious building programme so you've got air-conditioned acropolises emerging all over the show. There's a shiny new Alexander the Great statue in the town square which would definitely beat our Nelson's Column in a straight fight.
In short: Skopje = so much better than expected.
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