"Zdravo" Means Hello

I arrived in Podgorica on Thursday evening and checking into my wonderful airbnb pretty quickly. Indeed, I was the first one off the plane, got through passport control at the charmingly low-rent small-town Balkan airport in seconds, and somehow found my bags already circling on the baggage claim. Something like ... four minutes after the plane landed. Remarkable.

Anyway, I spent the weekend trying to readjust to the time zone, taking a walk to a sports bar to watch a Premier League game on TV (I met Marko, the bartender, who unfortunately turned out to be a Real Madrid fan, but we were able to more or less get along anyway), getting a membership at a health club ("I'm committed," he said, knowing how useless it was, "this time to taking advantage of the opportunity to get in shape!"), and watching a lot of the Big Ten basketball tournament on my laptop.

Oh, and struggling to order at restaurants, having to overcome their eye-rolling at the customs they take for granted but I don't know.

Anyway, yesterday I moved to a new airbnb, where I'll spend the next ten days. And, again last night, watched the Big Ten tournament.

Worth it.

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Going forward, instead of long posts about Montenegro, in all its weirdness and wonder, I'll try to make several shorter ones, focusing on particular experiences and items of interest. This time ... some of the restaurants and shops in my new neighborhood, about a 15-20 minute walk from the center, but only about two minutes from the largest mall in Montenegro!

I'm actually living in a modernish housing development, with three or four 7- or 8-floor apartment buildings over shops, cafes, barber shops, markets, and restaurants. Lots of places to get what I consider fairly tasteless (but cheap!) cappuccino, and lots of places showing their international aspirations with English names. (Oh, and "Pica" means "drinks" — my Slavic-language-speaking friends will recognize how close it it is to their language).

Honesty in advertising, I guess.

Both an IP infringement and vaguely sexist, but funny!

Oooh, so close!

My favorite place here, though, is a bakery run by an entire family of Kosovars, including the charming 20-year-old woman behind the counter, who is so far the only person in the food-service industry I've met here who smiles and laughs, and with whom I quickly struck up a friendship. She — Šahe — works, I kid you not, 18 hours a day here, seven days a week, with her brothers and father working similar hours downstairs in the bakery itself. It's remarkable, and again reminds me what hard work actually is, and how unfamiliar so many Americans actually are with it. And she smiles! (I asked her how, and she says, "lots of coffee"). 

They even have wifi, and I'm writing here, 7:15 pm, with a can of Coke Zero on the table in front of me. Almost everyone who comes in speaks a pidgin English with her, as they've become familiar with the fact that she doesn't really speak Serbian yet (Albanian being the language in Kosovo), and everyone finds ways to convey "I would like a baguette" and "that will be one euro." It's all friendly. Sometimes her brothers or younger sister bring up — as the 12-year old sister is doing now — a new pizza, or new loaves of bread. I'm charmed.

Šahe at work

Ok, that's it for today. Tomorrow: Statues!