Montenegro - A Survival Guide

Work on the house might be progressing at a steady rate, but right now, unless you’re interested in the minutiae of drainage pipe positioning, laying re-enforced concrete or tracking down someone to make a large number of wooden doors and windows, it’s not a particularly riveting thing to read about. Instead, this week, I thought I’d give you all a brief flavour of what it’s actually like to live here at Lake Skadar.

Things You’ll Need to get Used to if You Move to Montenegro

Resetting your watch
Montenegrins have a fluid concept of time. A Montenegrin minute can last anything between 60 and 6000 seconds. A meeting at 10am can just as easily mean 12pm, or 2pm, or even sometime the following day. In Montenegro, the favourite local phrase is “polako”, which literally means “take it easy”. You’ll hear this a lot. You’ll spend some time waiting. For builders, immigration officials, plumbers, telephone calls. The current record stands at two and a half weeks waiting for Marko to give us Vlado the electrician’s telephone number. And we talk to Marko almost every day!

Shopping part One
As I write this I’m sitting in our terraced garden overlooking the lake on a wireless modem. There’s plentiful internet access in Montenegro. You just won’t find anything on it. In England, if you need to get hold of a roll of underfloor heating, you simply go online, find the best price, and order it for delivery. In Montenegro, shopping websites simply do not exist. In fact, websites don’t often exist; it’s often hard to find a Montenegrin business that has anything more perfunctory than a homepage. And even if there were any, you’d probably never be able to order anything on-line because a) most people here don’t have debit cards and b) most people here don’t have proper addresses! For example, if you want to send something to us (fan mail, tumeric, HP sauce, books) you simply write: Ben and Emma Heywood, 81305 Virpazar, Montenegro. They’ll know where to find us…

Shopping part Two
This lack of websites means that while you’re not spending time waiting for tradesmen to arrive you spend it driving all over town trying to find what you’re after. This applies equally to groceries as it does to house stuff. The towns of Bar, Podgorica, Petrovac and Cetinje are all within a 45 minute drive of Virpazar, but the trouble is that that there’s no one store that sells everything you need. Want peanut butter? That’ll be Mercator Mex on the road to Tuzi. Want mascarpone cheese? That’ll be the Voli in Petrovac. Green pesto? The Gold on the road to Podgorica. Good value bathroom tiles? That’ll be the ENMON near Kotor. Which sadly is the opposite side of the country to where you’ll find the nicest bathroom goods, the other side of Bar…

Lorries filled with stone
Montenegro is a mountainous, beautiful country, with stunning scenery and twisting, vertiginous roads. Sadly, they are mostly single carriageway and not in the rudest of health, which means that while you’re driving from Virpazar to Rožaje so you can talk to a man who makes wooden beds you’ll be more than likely stuck behind a procession of slow-moving trucks filled with one of Montenegro’s most exportable products – stone.

Car crashes
This inevitably means that there are always an impatient majority looking to get past these lorries so they have an outside chance of being on time for their appointment (ironic considering that whoever they’re meeting is bound to be late anyway). They overtake on blind bends, dips in the road, over bridges, viaducts and anywhere else entirely inappropriate. You will eventually have to adopt a different approach to that you’re used to back home. Essentially, if you think there’s no room for the flash git in the Merc to try and overtake at 50mph on a sharp bend given there’s cliff on one side and a 500m drop on the other, think again. He will. This means that you’ll see an awful lot of accidents, an awful lot of road-side rocks with “autošlep” written on them (breakdown service) and will more than likely spend half your journey in a massive traffic jam as they scrape the remains of another German saloon out of the side of the mountain (at least you will if you’re heading north to Kolašin). But never mind. You’ll just have more time to improve your Cyrillic on all the gravestones erected at the side of the road to commemorate those who’ve perished before you. And admire all the entrepreneurial roadside vendors specialising in plastic flowers…

Not being able to afford a new car
Don’t think that you’ll be getting your hands on a German saloon anytime soon if you’re earning a Montenegrin wage. As in a lot of developing countries, cars are unfairly expensive here. Actually, they are ludicrously expensive here, which might explain the joke about Monte’s old tourism board slogan reading “Come to Montenegro! Your car is here already”. As an example, our friend Novak’s crap Mark II Golf – of 1988 vintage – cost him €1700. Which is more than our Honda (twice the car, half the age, even without a rear differential) cost us back in London.

Restaurant portions that Americans would think twice about
Thankfully you’ll claw back all those pennies you’ve spent on your wheels when it comes to filling your belly. Montenegrin food is served in one size only: giant. Pizzas are like wagon wheels (although I can’t see the Montenegrin habit of drizzling them with ketchup catching on) and steaks – especially the yummy punjeni plješcavica or Njeguši – weigh in at 500g as standard. No wonder the average Montenegrin man stands well over 6’4”. Most restaurants are also seriously good value – the one down the road from us that serves insane portions does so for just €7.50. The downside? Well, variety and indeed most other spices of life are in short supply. You’ll eat an awful lot of meat and cheese. And vegetarians will starve. Although there are plentiful fish, as yet no Montenegrin seems to have discovered the secret of cooking them properly!

Very cheap drink
More good news. A pint of beer will never cost you more than €1.70 in a bar and the excellent local Vranac and Krstač wines can be picked up in your local supermarket for about €2.50 a bottle. Go further afield and make friends with the local vintners (as we seem to do) and things get better still, with deliciously smooth bottles of reserve claret for little more than €8 – and that’s if they let you pay in the first place. Montenegrins are hugely friendly and generous people. The other thing you’ll drink a lot of is loza, which is the local version of grappa. It tastes like vodka, goes down like petrol and they drink it for breakfast. And lunch. Short of swilling down Flash, I can think of little that will rot your gut faster.

Cigarettes
Of course, you can always inhale poison for fun instead of swallowing paint stripper. Fags out here are a habit-inducing €0.80 a packet thanks to the Albanians over the border. Most cigarettes arrive in Montenegro illegally, but as most locals are on a packet a day there’s not exactly been a crackdown on smuggling. Another thing you’ll have to get used to is the somewhat incongruous smoking ban in public places, which has been accepted with far less difficulty than you might imagine in such a nicotine-fuelled society. Basically, it’s roundly ignored!

Unusual music
I’m not usually prone to generalisations (stop sniggering at the back), but I think I can confidently claim without fear of backtracking that Montenegrin music is at best an acquired taste. Their traditional tunes sound like polkas crossed with Turkish caterwauling and are about as easy on the ear as bagpipes. Their TV and radio jingles are stunningly loud and go on forever (anyone who remembers Chris Morris’ Brass Eye will know what I mean). The saving grace, however, is what Emma and I have labelled “School FM”. As you might have gathered, we spend quite a lot of our time in the car, and were it not for School FM we might have already driven over the edge of a ravine in search of half-decent pop music. Hitting the airwaves only in the afternoon, School FM’s playlist appears to consist entirely of forgotten 80s and 90s classics – and I’m not talking about the obvious ones either. Half the time Emma and I sigh in a blur of nostalgia and ask “oooh, now who sang this one?” Johnny Hates Jazz, Doctor and the Medics, T’Pau, Soul II Soul, Matthew Wilder and whoever it was that sung “Dub be Good to me” are all regulars. It’s almost as though they ran out of money as soon as CDs took over and all they’ve got left is a playlist of NOW! Albums on vinyl and a monkey with a pin to select tracks at random. You’ll love it.

Not mentioning the war
A big one, this. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it. You’ll have to accept that a lot of very nice people you know may have been forced into some very bad shit during a particularly horrible time. You won’t want to know what they’ve seen and they won’t want to tell you, be they Montenegrin, Serb, ethnic-Albanian, Kosovan, Bosnian, Croatian or any mixture of any of the above. With a couple of notable exceptions, it wasn’t a case of one side good, one side bad; and unless you’ve seriously read up on it all it’s a subject best avoided, especially when you the person you are talking to lets on that their sons are called Slobodan and Miloš…

What Kosovo means to Serbia
Montenegro has only been its own country for 20 months. Before that, it was part of Serbia & Montenegro, which means a lot of Serbian people still live here. Kosovo has been part of Serbia for hundreds of years, although following the 1389 Battle of Kosovo – where the Turkish army essentially brought about the fall of the medieval Serbian empire - the population has been 90% muslim/ethnic Albanian. You’d have thought that 700 years might have been long enough for Serbia to get used to the idea that it might have to let Kosovo go one day, but ever since Montenegro recognised Kosovo’s claim for independence recently (as a pre-requisite for joining the EU) protests from the ethnic Serb population in Monte have become increasingly frequent. They want the issue to be put to a referendum. Montenegro’s leaders have so far refused. There. Now you know as much as I do. Reckon that’s enough to brave a conversation with the locals about it? Nope. Neither do I.

Serbo-Croat/Srpski/Hrvatski/Crnogorski/Materni Jezik
That’s assuming, of course, that you can talk with the locals at all. Montenegro has a language identity crisis. Basically, the language they speak is Serbo-Croat, but because they were until recently joined to Serbia some people call it Srpski. Some – mostly non-Serbs – will refer to it as Crnogorski. Of course no-one calls it Hrvatski, which is ironic as this is the dialect it most resembles in both written and spoken form (!). The government, sensing this dilemma, has settled on the appellation “materni jezik”, or mother tongue, a term almost nobody uses. Depending on your preference, either roman or Cyrillic alphabets can be used. Either way, if you live in Virpazar, the one language you’re not going to hear a lot of is English, and thus mastering SC/S/H/C/MJ is going to be very, very necessary. We currently speak like badly educated 8-year olds, which although an improvement of about three years since we arrived can cause a few difficulties when we’re talking about visa applications, door hinges and toilet waste pipes. Basically, you feel a little retarded, and even simple things can be lost in translation if you’re not careful. If you’re doing anything property-related, you’ll get through a lot of paper and pencils. And you get used to carrying a dictionary around with you everywhere.

People asking you if you have kids yet
Montenegrin people love the idea of family, so naturally the first question you get asked as a couple is if you’ve got any. If not, the next question will always be “Zašto ne?” – why not? You’ll need a few sentences pre-prepared for this eventuality. We use “we need a house first, and did not want to start a family in London, which is too dangerous”. We haven’t yet figured out what our excuse will be once the house is finished. Still, it’s better than being a single woman out here, as Jess discovered. Not only will you get constantly asked why you’re not married yet, but every single man over 50 will – rather sweetly – hit on you. We advise a fake wedding ring and a solid back-story about your fiancé being an SAS Commando.

Guns. Lots of guns
Montenegrin men have always been traditionally armed, even when the weapon of choice was a sabre. It’s therefore not unusual for them to show off their ordnance to you, most of which are rifles used in the winter for hunting. That said, it can still be a little disconcerting for the namby-pamby Brit to accost a friend in his car and on asking him what the bundle is on the passenger seat, be told that it’s a new case full of ammunition. Silly question, really. The camo outfit is usually a dead giveaway.

Men hugging
Montenegrin men are men’s men. They are big, they are tall, and many of them, despite being lovely guys, look like they could easily kill you if it were required. This makes their habit of hugging each other even more incongruous. Wait until you’ve been bear-hugged by a drunk, shaven-headed plumber in his camouflage gear. You could wind up getting very confused.

Outfits to make Posh Spice faint
Or, bluntly put, women dressed like cast-offs from Girls Aloud. Leopard print is perfectly acceptable out here, as are boob-tubes and mini-skirts, pink-with-green, aubergine-coloured hair and heels that would topple Naomi Campbell. The only reason so many of them get away with it (just) is that for the most part women here have amazing figures. I’ve seen similar tastes in Croydon and it ain’t pretty – obesity in Monte is practically non-existent. The men don’t dress much better, favouring as they do the matching track-suit, white trainers and a crew cut, but it would be unfair to suggest the whole country is a style-free zone. There are plenty of sharp suits and elegant cuts to go around too – you just don’t see them outside of the town centres. What they make of my usual outfit (combat trousers, t-shirt, specs, fleece) I have no idea, but I’ll confess this to you; I don’t exactly blend.

So that’s all for now folks. Back to the daily grind of designing our business logo and getting a house built…