I arrived at the Ljubljana airport around 10 I suppose. I had to go between two desks to pay for baggage. The plane left 20 minutes late, around 12:30. They had picked up all the passengers from a canceled flight to Pristina. Pristina was completely fogged in but that no longer matters. The flight out of Pristina was curious, and probably the shortest scheduled flight I’ve been on: we were over Skopje in 10 minutes, and the next 10 were spent positioning ourselves over the runway to land.

Filip was there to meet me. We picked up Goran and went to a cafe and sat and talked for what, four hours? I hope I’m not being mean, forcing all these people to speak English for so long. I met Goran and Filip and three other of their friends at Lake Ohrid in 2008: he was captioned “Boy with a small turtle” in this photo from that trip.  He is decidedly not a boy any more:  a couple of years after I met him, he decided he would become a bodybuilder. He has dedicated his life to that. His arms are bigger around than most of the legs in the world, at least before mere obesity became the defining body characteristic of poverty.