Trip to Sofia; Part 1: Crossing the border

So, it's taken me a little while, but I am finally posting about my trip to Sofia, Bulgaria last weekend. We had an extra day off from work for a national holiday, so R., J. and I decided to spend the weekend exploring Sofia. We took the bus from Skopje bus station on Thursday afternoon. It was about 2 hours from Skopje to the Macedonian border. Along the way we passed a large number of fields, mountains, farms, and goats! The goats were being tended by old men or old women sitting in chairs in the fields. We reached the border, where we stopped, and a border guard got on. He proceeded to make his way down the aisle, collecting our passports. He then got off the bus, and spent about fifteen or twenty minutes presumably examining them and stamping them. He got back on after that and handed all our passports to a passenger on the bus who had the responsibility of handing them back to everyone.
We drove about 50 feet and then stopped again. This time, a Bulgarian border guard got on, collected all our passports and got off again. We drove another 20 feet to a little area where we were allowed to get off the bus and stand around. Finally, after another fifteen or twenty minutes, the border guard came back, we got back on the bus and another passenger was entrusted with the task of giving back our passports. I don't think I've ever had a border crossing quite like that before, but the important thing is that it went fairly smoothly. After that, we drove another two hours along dark and windy mountain roads until we reached Sofia.