Where in the World is North Macedonia?

I must admit, I needed to look at a map to find the country. I had heard of Macedonia, but I thought that was in Greece. And it is. But what was this NORTH thing? It was the summer of 2022 and in anticipation of retiring from BU, I looked into spending a semester teaching abroad while I was still technically on the faculty.

 The Fulbright program had four options for journalism professors: Japan, Zambia, the West Bank (which in hindsight.....and North Macedonia. Japan is an expensive place to live, I'd been there a few times and spent a semester in China and decided I wanted  to see a different part of the world. Zambia was very interesting, the BU School of Public Health has a big presence there and folks said it was much like South Africa, with good medical access and decent infrastructure. But they wanted me there for a year and I wasn't up for that long of a commitment. That left the West Bank, which I was very interested in because I had been there briefly a few years ago on a faculty junket to Israel and the occupied territories. But thankfully, and for reasons that I can no longer remember, we opted for North Macedonia. 

 NoMac (as I am now calling it)  was created following demise of the former country of Yugoslavia . Greece (with its own section called Macedonia) is directly south, Albania is to the west, Kosovo to the north and Bulgaria to the east.

We leave January 9, flying to Skopje, the capital of NoMac, where we have rented an airbnb for five months. We will drop off our big suitcases and then fly on the 10th to Istanbul for a few days before officially beginning the Fulbright grant on January 15th.