FAQ

What, do you suppose, is the question guests ask us more often than any other? In Pick o’ the Pops style, I’ll give you the runners-up first, with answers attached so my twos of readers may wonder no longer.

In third place, it’s the rather obvious “What made you choose Montenegro?”

Short version: 2004, bought a place in Croatia, did it up, rented it out, started learning the lingo. 2005, went travelling. 2006 returned and never settled again. 2008, decided to change our lives, sold London terraced house, went searching for a taste of Africa somewhere in Europe, hoping to set up a holiday business of some sort. Came across Lake Skadar in the first week of a mooted 3 month trawl through central-eastern Europe’s beauty spots, and after being blown away by its beauty, decided that was that.

In second place, it’s “What will you do about the kids’ education?”

Short version: In a radical turn of events, we shall be sending them to school.

The bronze medalist is the first thing that most people ask. The silver medalist follows once our guests have gotten to know us a bit better, usually a few days later. The third question however – and the winner of my rhetorical quiz – is the following, usually asked right near the end of the holiday:

“So...if you don’t mind my asking...how much did you pay for the villa?”

This is usually where some obfuscation occurs. We decided early in our venture that we would never tell anyone what the house and its renovations costs us. We just didn't want to provoke conversations about a) how we managed it so cheaply or b) why we paid so much. We've had both reactions coming from the same set of figures, by the way, on the rare occasions when we have revealed anything. It’s natural that others see what we've done here and start thinking to themselves whether they might be able to do something similar – here or elsewhere. It’s only human. It’s how we ourselves got started (nods to Penny & Duncan and Craig and Xania due at this point). Our numerophobia then leads to the inevitable part-two of the above poser:

“How much would other property cost here, then?”

Now that, my friends, is a question worth answering. Montenegro is a beautiful but cheap country to holiday in. Away from the coast, might it also be a good value place to find a lovely stone house/ruin such as we did? Our standard answer to this one has always been that’s it’s impossible to say as the only foreigners we know who have bought in this region are...well...us - and with no-one really buying the prices here can vary wildly depending on the vendors’ relationship with reality. Curiosity got the better of me last night and for the first time in five years I put the words “Virpazar real estate” into Google. Five years ago such a search term would have yielded bugger all, so progress has been made – within half an hour I found around 30 real estate offers of varying kinds all situated around Lake Skadar and its environs.

It is therefore time to play The Price is Wrong! See if you can guess the actual asking prices for the following five properties, all of which can be found on-line.

120sqm, 1000sqm land, 3 beds, no lake view

a) €45,000

b) €90,000

c) €200,000

200sqm, 6500sqm land, no lake view, unfinished inside

a) €30,000

b) €75,000

c) €150,000

90sqm, land unspecified, no lake view, condition unknown (but guessable)

a) €25,000

b) €60,000

c) €290,000

320sqm with 150sqm glazed area for indoor pool, 220sqm garden, 30m from lakeside

a) €180,000

b) €380,000

c) €1,500,000

20,000sqm estate with 5000 vines, 100 olive trees and one 100sqm 2-bed house with cellar

a) €650,000

b) €950,000

c) €2,600,000

If you answered mostly “a”s, congratulations. You are probably a wise judge of a property’s worth – good luck convincing the owners that they are all nuts. If you answered mostly “b”s there’s a strong chance you have no idea whatsoever what you’re doing and should really stay away from the property market altogether. If you answered mostly “c”s, Добро пожаловать, друзья, у нас есть некоторые замечательные сделки для вас!

Yep, the real asking prices are all “c”s.

Have you stopped laughing yet (especially at no:4)?

If the first three rules of buying property in the west are location, location and location, the first three rules of selling here in inland Montenegro are “ask for more than your neighbour” – I shall call it Monty’s Law. Monty’s Law adheres to the following formula: if house X sells for €x, and Y is twice the size of X but in a much worse location with no view, built out of breeze blocks and in a state of repair a tramp would decline, the price naturally becomes €2x. Sometimes, properties are “owned” by several members of the same family, all of whom have to agree to sell and all of whom have to agree on their share. If they all decide there’s really no sense selling for less than, say €20,000pp, and there are six of them, then suddenly your crappy 1970s built 2-bed bungalow becomes “worth” €120,000. And no-one, not even a mental Russian, is going to pay that. So nothing sells. And the next guy to put his house on the market sees this price and applies Monty’s Law. Not a month goes by during summer where a local doesn’t ask us to value and then market their house to other foreigners (despite this not really being what we do here). And most of the time, their asking prices are so high it’s jolly hard to keep a straight face.

Now on the coast, where there has long been a competitive property market, it’s easy to compare, contrast and price up because stuff sells there all the time. Around Lake Skadar, however, there is no market. Which came first, the lack of sales or the crazy prices? Who knows. All I can tell you is that if you want to invest in this area, it pays to take your time. There are plenty of beautiful old stone houses out here needing a bit of TLC (ok, a lot of TLC), but you need to know where to look, and you need to be patient - as well as persistent. These are the sorts of places that often have multiple ownership issues to sort out, but if you're brave enough to take that challenge on there are bargains out there, sold by vendors who have accepted real-world economics. We decided to build on our own land rather than buy another place in the area simply because for us, financially, it’s a no-contest, at least for the moment. We keep adding landscaping ideas to the project, and adding stuff tends to have a detrimental affect on the budget...!

So what has been happening on the build then?

Excavation, that’s what. After four days of rain we got not one, but two diggers on site, narrowly missing electrical cables and water pipes as they clear the way for what promises to be an awful lot of concrete.

We're crossing our fingers that we can get the foundations finished before it starts raining again. And we're hoping that for now we're all out of fancy landscaping ideas so that we still have an outside chance of moving into it come April...

Where's the smiley for "yikes"?

Team building

As anyone who has spent any time in Montenegro will tell you, time is relative. Like Matthew McConaughey travelling through a wormhole, minutes, hours and weeks can mean varying units of time depending on who you are meeting, why you are meeting them, what you intend to be doing. Usually, then, if you are talking to a builder (in my experience), your standard units of measuring time assume somewhat stretchy, quantum proportions  – 14:00 can mean any time from 14:00 until some time next week, tomorrow can mean the next day, the one after it or the one after that, and next week can mean next month.

But not with Musa and his crew!*

Bolimir’s half-wits from 2008 would have turned up wearing converse trainers, t-shirts and without spades, brains or cigarettes. They then would have worked slowly using tools fashioned from garden wood, bunking off whenever a few drops of rain fell. That is if they had bothered to show up at all.

With ten days of more or less dry weather, Musa’s guys turned up at seven on the dot every day for ten days running, forming boards, steels, cement and gravel all in position and ready to go. They finished not only our new septic tank, but also the large supporting wall necessary to bear the weight of the new building above it with perfect timing so that by the time the rain did fall, the concrete had set. Now, with the digger they require for the house foundation channels unavailable for the days they want, they have set to work making the internal steels in advance, and making sure they have all other necessary materials delivered so that when the digger does arrive they are ready to go.

I know. Too good to be true, right? Just as well they put a shift or two in, because now it’s raining heavily, and until it stops there will be no digger and no concreting. Ah well.

In addition to Marko the architect (struggling to cope with clients who have started building before he’s finished his plans) and Imzo, Musa and team, we are also assembling some – but not all – of the all-star Dragan team from 6 years ago. Dragan Majstor is gone (I mean absent, not dead, although he might well be given his Drina intake), Electric Dragan and American Dragan both dropped, the former for being a volatile arse with a tendency to stomp off site like a six year old at the merest criticism and the latter because his prices have become a little high. Dragan the Carpenter and Dragan the Plumber are back on board, however. New signings have also been made, more of which next time. And none of them are called Dragan, which makes a nice change.

In the meantime, I managed to get time off for good behaviour to see some teams of a different variety – namely Montenegro versus Sweden at the compact but atmospheric  Budučnosti stadium in Podgorica. I’d been shouted a ticket by the extremely well-connected Ben Perks, one of several Podgorica-based Brits I’ve rather belatedly been getting to know over the last few weeks. Now that our ridiculously busy season is over and George and Evie are sleeping through the night, I can finally rebuild by social life, which, Emma apart, has of late taken the sort of battering that Montenegro’s football team have had to get used to over the years.

Ben P, Drago (honorary Brit), me, Marty, Adrian and 2 blokes I can't remember!

I was excited to go to my first football match for over 4 years because of one man’s likely participation; the legendary Zlatan Ibrahimović. Despite his very Balkan name, he is of course the hugely egotistical and phenomenally talented captain of Sweden, a man whose outrageous goals are only marginally more famous than his near complete aversion to physical exertion, sort of a Swedish Matthew Le Tissier but with slightly glossier hair. Anyone who follows football will have an opinion about Zlatan, positive or negative, and not only would this be the first time I’d ever seen him play live, but it would also be my first time supporting my adopted country’s national side (bit tricky to do when they were playing England in the last two qualifying tournaments).

At €10 a pop, the tickets were absurdly good value, and the north stand was full of bouncing, booming Montenegrins taking as many opportunities as possible to light flares, chuck toilet roll onto the pitch and make insinuations about Ibrahimović’s sexuality and oral hygiene preferences. We were, of course, in the rather safer environs of the west stand, with an excellent view of what turned out to be a pretty entertaining game.

Well, the last 10 minutes anyway. After Sweden went a goal up early on it seemed as though all that would really happen was that the Scandos would probe and pass without really putting a shift in while the Montenegrins relied on their defence to either gift the Swedes a second goal as they had done the first or bail them out from set pieces (the only times they really threatened were from corners). With the Montenegrin captain and talisman, Stevan Jovetić, seeing little of the ball, I began Zlatan watching instead. The big man turned in a pretty typical sort of performance, demanding the ball be played to his feet (presumably so he was spared the effort of sprinting) and glaring at any team-mate who attempted a through ball for him to run on to. Watching him receive the ball in the attacking third of the pitch was a study in what I shall call Zlatanism. First he would glance up, instantly calculating the likelihood of scoring the world’s most astonishing goal from wherever he happened to be on the pitch, and if he decided it was beyond even him he would reluctantly let the ball go, passes to team-mates very much a secondary consideration. He fell over a few times, sliced one volley so wide it went for a throw in, passed the ball into space where no-one was on at least five occasions and broke into something more than a jog twice. Apart from rattling a post with a rasping free kick and – oh yeah – scoring the opening goal, he did next to nothing all game...! Like I said, pretty typical.

Sweden’s lethargy/complacency was to do for them eventually. With 10 minutes to go, the Montenegrin no:16, who had spent much of the match sprinting gamely down the right wing and then falling over, sprinted down the right wing into the penalty area and then fell over a naively outstretched leg. Penalty! Jovetić tucked it nervelessly away to raucous cheers from the home crowd – and then we got a proper ding-dong of a finale as the game degenerated into an end-to-end free-for-all more in common with parks football. We had full length saves, last gasp tackles, a controversially disallowed goal (for Sweden) and a pair of stunning misses, one from Sweden’s no:9 from 6 yards and one from an unidentified Montenegrin player from what looked like 6 inches – how he managed to put that over the bar I’ll never know. It finished 1-1, a pretty fair result and a pretty good one for Montenegro, a country that has just 650,000 citizens (fewer, their coach had once joked, than the total number of pro footballers in England).

I’m going to have to do this sort of thing more often...

So that’s the weekend done. Now it’s time to get back to work (assuming that the rain does at least desist for a couple of days). We’ve got a house to build...

*at least not yet, I reserve the right to revise this opinion if he turns out after all to be a lying, drunk waster.

Montenegro discovers shopping vouchers...and makes a right pig's arse out out of it

There are quite a few retail organisations in Montenegro for whom I wouldn't mind having a loyalty card. KIPS, for example, the DIY chain in whose inconsistently stocked stores I have spent a fair few bob over the years. OKOV, their great rivals, would be another (because, even now, they each sell a couple of items the other - unaccountably - does not). EKO petrol - given that I run two Landrovers - would be another. However, now that I have three children, the shop that hoovers up by far the greatest proportion of my hard earned cash is Voli.

For those not living over here, Voli is a bit like Tesco in that it's a supermarket chain that has large and small stores all over the country. Voli is not really like Tesco in that no matter what the size of the store the wares for sale appear to be exactly the same - so if you visit the Mega-Voli near Delta City you will find, mascarpone and baked beans aside, that it stocks exactly the same stuff as the little Voli in Virpazar but just has rather more of it. Voli is rubbish, but it's what we got.

Voli is also pretty dependable. It will have a large meat counter selling 30 kinds of spam. It will have a bakery section with loads of white bread and a few loaves of brown, and some croissant if you get there early enough. It will have a tiny fruit and veg section with a pitiful selection of withered greens and browning bananas. The booze aisle will be the largest and best stocked in the building. Everything you buy will be placed in its own plastic bag unless you tell them not to (in case a can of tuna somehow gets infected by a bag of washing powder). Voli to us, like to many Montenegrins, is simply a member of your family.

They are not free of competition, however. There is Maxi (shit), Mercator (shit) and Roda (shit), not to mention Gold (shit but with good veg). If any of these lot upped their game and became, however briefly, not shit, Voli might not have everything its own way. With this vaguest of threats in mind, Voli has decided to incentivise its customers to shop only at Voli. It'd be too much to expect them to adopt loyalty cards, but they've clearly been giving the concept a lot of thought, so much so that they have decided to trial-run a voucher system this last month or so.

This is how a voucher system works in the UK:
1. You get given a £2.50 voucher
2. You get £2.50 off your bill

This is how the voucher system works in Voli:
1. You get given a €2.50 voucher
2. You can't use it immediately, only the next time you're in Voli
3. The next time you're in Voli you get €2.50 off your next bill.
3ii. As long as you spend more than €10 with your bank card, not cash
3iii. And as long as you find (an) item(s) that cost(s) - hah! - exactly (ie, round about, as odd cents are always rounded up or down here) €2.50
3iv. That come(s) from the same manufacturer
4. You then have to sign a specially printed out page of A4 before you can leave the store

All together now....WTF???

This how I came to be in Virpazar's Voli being told that a combination of icing sugar and baby wipes would not entitle me to €2.50 off my bill because they didn't add up to the (almost) exact amount and because they were made by two different companies. So I bought a bar of butter for €2.56, which was deemed close enough. And then I had to wait 5 minutes while they printed out my receipt, found a pen, and got me to sign for the butter, like a chit.

I don't think they're quite ready for Nectar cards.

History can teach us nothing

Someone wise once said that the key to life is learning from your mistakes without at the same time making a whole bunch of new ones. It might have been Yoda. Or Jennifer Aniston (left,) in Friends. I don’t know, they both look the same to me. There's no snappy intro to this blog post because I haven’t written anything longer than my name for about 18 months, so apologies in advance. I’m a bit rusty.

Er...we’re building again!

Now those twos of you who read my blog 5-6 years ago when we were doing this the last time will be scratching your heads and thinking “what? After all the heartache and stress of their last build project, and after coming out the other side with a successful business, why on earth would they choose to go through all that shite again?”

The answer(s) are below:

George, Evie, and a very big cake

Since my last post way back in April 2013, we’ve had two new additions to the family – three if you also count Peggy the dog - and 5 into 2 bedrooms (which is what we’re currently renting while our villa is full of guests) just doesn’t go – at least not in any way that will ensure a good night’s sleep for all. Expansion is the only way forward. And our idea of expansion looks like this:

Yep, it's a whole other house. We’ve sold our place in Norwich, cut our last bricks and mortar ties with the UK and will now build another house house here in Montenegro. Frighteningly, only marginally smaller than the first one, it’s a 4-bedroom, 3 bathroom design that is going to sit alongside Villa Miela (which would be to the right in the picture above) and ensure that we have somewhere to live that is a) large enough for our growing family and b) on our own land so that we can run our business on site.

Terrifiying, eh?

So far, our prior experience has stood us in good stead. Rather than use red crayon and then maths paper to design the house ourselves, this time we’ve hired an architect. Rather than choosing the first builder to drunkenly scribble down a ballpark quote, this time we’ve hired a team that came recommended by a friend and appear to know what they’re doing. Rather than having to use a friend to translate for us (a friend who, comically, can’t actually speak English but he didn’t let this deter him from giving it a go), this time we can speak to the builder direct, and understand each other reasonably well. Rather than cost up the project with no real idea of what it might cost or how long it might take, this time we’ve budgeted properly and even allowed sufficient time to get phase one complete by the time we open for business again next April (we hope).

Well done us, eh?

Well, we’ll see. The plan is to get the outside of the house watertight and finished by April so that the east side of Villa Miela doesn’t look like a building site. Any interior progress will be seen as a bonus, with the minimum involving one working bathroom and working kitchen so that we can live in it even if it’s not 100% finished. Proper finishing, landscaping and all that jazz can then be done either quietly during the summer or properly and quickly the following winter.

We’re starting it all a little later than would be ideal, but progress on day 1 was promising. Rather than a team of unskilled doofi excavating by hand, Musa has brought in a digger, arriving bang on time and already achieved more in a few hours than the aforementioned band of berks managed in several weeks back in October 2008.

Powering over our wall and down the terraces at a frankly disturbing angle, we’ve already laid waste to 2 fig trees, one mulberry tree (boo, but they were all in the way) and several old stone walls. Speedy and scary all in one. Days two and three brought further good news - site preparation and - glory be - clearance that involved tidying up rather than simply chucking stuff down to the lower levels. We’ll see what derails our progress first – time, money or the weather – but this is at least a vaguely promising start. Musa reckons they’ll need five good days to finish the septic chamber and the supporting wall that will underpin the entire structure. Seems optimistic to this Balkan building cynic, but you never know. I'll let you know in a couple of weeks...