Cybersex

Our luck on this trip is sometimes staggering, and now thanks to Leigh's high school friend Pance, we have an apartment to live in close to the center of Skopje, Macedonia. It is perfect, situtated on top of the local green market, where peaches are cheaper than apples and we can by one egg at a time.

Despite the fact that we are still in a culture that drinks more than we can and dresses infinitely better than we do. However, we are lucky to have stumbled into Pance's fantastic group of self-professed geeks. They go to electronic conferences that sound more like huge raves than geek gatherings, but can drink until three and get up at eight in the morning for work.

Most days, we sleep until the mid-afternoon, spreading our arms and legs as far apart as possible as it is to hot to do anything except harrass the person who dares bring their limb close to the other's. The day usually starts with breakfast, a lesson from the yoga book and then the search for coffee or ice cream. Perhaps the biggest daily challange is ordering coffee, which we want iced, and not two cubes which will soon turn my cocktail into a diluted half-caff stew. Four days later, we still do not know the Macedonian word for ice (but we do know the word for hangover). At night, when we are not watching the Eurocup (GO SPAIN!) we busy ourselves trying to find out what the hell Greece is so worked up about.

And so with a life like this, who needs to come home and get a job?

Well, we do. Believe it or not, six months abroad is only cheap if you manage to circumvent Europe. As we let our funds dwindle we begin to miss the sensation of a good, hard, Puritan day of work. Turns out we are Americans and Americans love to work. So as much as we might poke fun at all our engineering friends, you're the one's whose couches (or vacation homes?) we might be sleeping at when we get home.

So, signing off with the favorite joke of our new friends, here is a shout out to all our beloved geeks:

There is a survey being conducted about Cybersex on the three campuses of the school, the Engineering campus, the Business campus and the Art campus. The interviewer approaches a student from the Art school and askes her "do you know what Cybersex is?" She gets a confused look on her face and askes "what kind of sex?"

Next he askes a student from the Business school, "do you know what Cybersex is?" He looks at the interviewer with a strange look and asks, "what kind of sex?"

Lastly, the interviewer finds an engineering student and asks him, "do you know what Cybersex is?" The Engineer looks puzzled and asks "Cyber what?"