The Good, the Bad and the Bloody

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks or so since I last posted. We’ve got ourselves a kitten, entertained our first “guest” (Emma’s best friend Jess), spent seven hours in a car to see Madonna for 40 minutes and reached the seventh anniversary of meeting each other. And then my wife stabbed herself…

Jess had been with us a few days when we decided to take her with us to Tuzi, an Albanian run market near the border which was very much the best place to go to get super-cheap household goods – not to mention power tools. With a six-month renovation project ahead of us, it was a more or less essential visit – and in this respect, it was a complete failure. About four miles away from the market we saw a tiny, stuttering, ginger kitten taking the frankly scary decision to cross the road while cars drove by in both directions.

“Ben stop, we’ve got to help it,” Emma cried out, having already seen several similar instances where the cats in question had clearly already been badly injured or killed outright. I jumped out of the car. The kitten had stumbled underneath between my wheels, so I reached and fished it out; it then became obvious why the kitten had tried to cross the road. It didn’t know it was there. Both its eyes were shut fast, and not because it was still too young. It clearly had an eye infection, a sort of conjunctivitis which we’d often seen afflicting young cats on Vis. It cut a pathetic sight. Jess, Emma and I resolved instantly to find a vet and get him sorted out, as another minute or two on the road would surely have seen him squished. Amazingly, Tuzi also had a vet, albeit one more used to checking the health of the market’s livestock. He prescribed some simple eye drops, gave the kitten a shot in the arse with a large needle more usually employed on cattle, and told us that the eyes ought to return to normal in seven days.

We bought no power tools that day. Instead, we loaded up with cotton buds, a litter tray and plenty of kitten food. Once we were safely back in Virpazar, holding the squeaking, frightened feline close to our chests (and boy, was he thin), Emma held him while I swabbed his gummy eyes with Q-tips dipped in sterilised water, and then administered the first drops through the two tiny, swollen, red slits that passed for his eyes. What happened next was faintly miraculous (at least to us). Tuzi – for that was what we had already named him – revealed a couple of bright blue peepers.

A week later, not only were Tuzi’s eyes completely back to normal, but he’d progressed from milk to solids, apparently expanding to twice his previous size (so small was he that we thought him only 5 weeks old when he’s actually more like 7), he had managed to toilet-train himself after just two mis-haps, taught himself how to wash and even managed to run off a gippy leg that had seemed to be bothering him. In short, he progressed from a blind little bag of bones minutes from death to a healthy, bouncy, pouncing obsessed bundle of energy. And he’s dead cute.

We spent the remainder of the last week or two talking Jess through our plans for the house and the tourism business we’re looking to set up. As an eco-progressive and Monte-phile, she was ideally placed to help us through some of the finer points – including how best to adhere to established eco-holiday principles (some of which were rather more stringent than we had previously been aware). Despite a few eco-reservations, her general enthusiasm about what we had in mind came at just the right time. We were once again beginning to worry about just how much work we would be able to afford the first winter and were consequently struggling to lock down the design blueprints, so it was actually a relief having Jess around to give it all a fresher perspective. In fact, Jess had been with us when we had first seen the house back at our first visit to Skadar in May. Unaware that it was even available, we had driven past it and sighed to each other, “oooh – now wouldn’t it be nice if we could buy that one?”

Jess also proved a useful crash test dummy for some of our mooted excursions, restaurant partnerships and some of the gentler hikes we had in mind. We went wine-tasting in Upper Godinje, rock-hopped down a river in Crmnica Valley, hiked up to Obod Cave just a few kilometres past the historic town of Rijeka Cernojevica and then discovered, off a beaten track, a gorgeous series of waterfalls and plunge pools that were home to several species of brightly coloured frogs and which on a warmer day would have been fantastic to swim in and very nearly the equal of some of the spectacular natural swimming pools we had seen in Madagascar. It only strengthened our conviction that we had chosen the right place for our venture, a place full of staggering natural beauty with plenty of undiscovered gems waiting to be teased out from the folds of the mountains.

This conviction was increased once we had seen the Biogradska National Park, some two hours drive north of Virpazar. Grouped around the pretty ski resort town of Kolašin, Biogradska was home to some of Europe’s last remaining primeval forests with some pretty lakes of its own, and even in the chilly mountain air we could tell it was a beautiful place for hikers at any time of year. But – and these were the crucial buts – it was nowhere near as gorgeous as Skadar and property prices there were already well beyond us. We were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves as we drove back down south.

At least Jess and I were, because one kilometre out of Kolašin Emma decided to slice open a pomegranate on her knee with a Swiss Army Knife. In a moving car. And promptly sliced into her jeans, through the denim and into her right thigh.

“Oh shit,” she groaned.
“What?” we asked, Jess from the back seat and me keeping my eyes on the road.
“I’ve done something really stupid,” she wailed.
“What?” we asked again.
I glanced over and saw blood soaking through her jeans, bubbling up into her hand, which she had clamped down on her leg in a vain attempt to stem the flow.

The Honda screeched to a halt, we did an abrupt u-turn and steamed back the way we had come, pausing only to ask a policeman where the Kolašin hospital was. It actually sounds a bit more dramatic than it was. Emma was commendably calm, and the Kolašin doctors were so remarkably swift in covering the gash on her thigh in iodine and stitching it up (and thus stopping the bleeding) that we were back out in the corridor laughing about it all nervously barely 15 minutes after Emma had celebrated our seven year anniversary in somewhat unusual style.

Keep safe from all young children and Emmas

The zenith of Jess’ visit, however, was supposed to have been the Madonna gig on Jaz beach in Budva, for which we had purchased tickets several weeks beforehand from, of all places, a local bank in Bar. With the “show” due to start at 6pm on 25th September, we had planned to drive across in good time but had deferred to the local knowledge of Sara, Dean’s younger daughter, who told us with some conviction that Madge herself would not be taking to the stage until nearer 10.

“We can leave at six,” she said. “It is not far and it will not take long to get there.”

We shrugged and nodded. We should not have done. Montenegrins have – at best – a fluid concept of time, distance and cost. If you ask a Montenegrin how long something will take, they will say “ne dugo” (not long). If you ask a Montenegrin how far away something is, they will say “nije daleko” (it’s not far). If you ask a Montenegrin – especially a builder – how much something is, they will say “nije skup” (it’s not expensive). What they will not do is actually give you an accurate figure. Sara turned out to be right only in one respect; Madonna had indeed started near ten. The problem was, we hadn’t got to the venue until nearer 11 – some truly dreadful organisation had eschewed bussing people into town (as they had done the previous year for the Rolling Stones) in favour of letting everyone drive themselves to Budva, which is how we came to be stuck in a traffic jam for four hours, wound up parking in a field nowhere near the beach venue, had to hike across another field filled with cowpats for half an hour – in the dark – and caught only the last 35 minutes of the show. The same organisational chaos also ensured that the 5000 cars that had eventually made it then had to filter out of the car-park field through a single exit, which meant it took two hours just to get back onto the road. We eventually got home at half four in the morning, and not in the happiest of moods. Still, it could have been worse. Sara and her friends – who had travelled there in her boyfriend Uros’ car - had given up trying to get out of the car park at all and had spent the night in their car. The next day’s TV put the boot into the concert organisers, and also gave fairly average marks to the First Lady of Pop herself. She certainly wouldn’t have ranked it as one of her most successful performances. Once the last song was done, she was in her helicopter and off back to the Hotel Splendid before we had even made it out off the beach.

Madge rocks Budva. Kinda

Ah well. At least our builder came through for us with a quote good enough for us to set a putative start date of 8th October for the build. Now we just have to find a plasterer, a plumber and someone who can make decent doors for a reasonable price…