Food, glorious food

Last week's blog featured frequently asked questions about living here in Montenegro. I realise only belatedly that I forgot one that gets asked an awful lot: do I miss anything about the UK? Anything, that is, apart from a crushingly dull 9-5 job, rising knife crime, very expensive food and a hell of a lot of reality television.

What do I miss, then? My old friends. True, most of them had moved away from London to places I’d be unlikely to visit every week, but they were at least still in the UK. Friends, then. Friends, family and food.

Now I don’t mean that food is scarce in Montenegro. Trust me, there’s loads of it. Restaurant portion sizes are enormous, fruit and veg are so fresh they’ve just been growing a few minutes ago and the meat is generally of a quality unheard of in Blighty. There are, however, a few items you are unlikely to find in Montenegrin supermarkets. These are, in no particular order:

Cumin

Coriander

Indian spices

Thai spices

Coconut milk

British sausages

Bacon

Sweet chilli sauce

Stupid-flavoured crisps

Ben & Jerry’s

Big gooey US style cookies

Now the only one of these I actually miss is the sausages, because we import the spices ourselves and the rest can be nabbed over the border in Croatia, safely forgotten about without too much regret or made at home to a close enough standard. So there’s your answer: sausages.

It got me thinking, though – what do we get to enjoy here in Montenegro that others do not? Here, then, is a by no means definitive list of Montenegrin specialities that I might well miss were I ever to move back.

Kajmak

Kajmak is brilliant stuff. Sort of a cross between sour cream and cream cheese, it’s versatile and adaptable, coming in every bit as useful when making a cake as it is dropping it over chilli or spreading it on crackers. It should be available everywhere as a pantry staple.

Smokis

The easiest way to describe Smokis to those unfamiliar with them is to call them peanut flavoured Wotsits. I know, they sound disgusting. You eat one, screw your face up, and wonder what fiendish, nefarious do-badder could have come up with such a concoction. What is that taste? So you have another. And another. And despite not really liking them, 5 minutes later you discover you’ve eaten a family-sized bag of the things. They are seriously, ruiningly addictive.

Kefir

Runny, mild pro-biotic cross between buttermilk and yoghurt. Great over muesli, excellent in pancakes and scones and a good way to repair your tummy after all the meat and fish you'll be eating (see below).

Pasulj

This is a traditional Balkan bean stew with bits of meat in it, and one of the very few “ready” meals available in local supermarkets. Avoid this variant though on account of it being revolting – what you’re after is the home-made version. On a cold, wet day, there’s little tastier. Except sausages, of course.

Kulen

Now I’ve avoided mentioning prsut only because it’s hardly a Montenegrin invention, being popular all over the Balkans and in places every bit the equal to its more famous cousins from Parma or Serrano. Kulen, however, is decidedly Montenegrin, a spicy, fierce chorizo-like cold cut that puts to shame the twenty kinds of spam with which it is forced to share supermarket deli space.

Marinated carp

In the west, carp is more an ornamental than an eating fish – and granted, if carp is cooked badly, it’s dreadful. Smoked and marinated, however, it’s delicious. Plus, here in Montenegro it has the added bonus of being called “krap”, which is always worth a titter.

Cockta

Back in the 1970s, communist Yugoslavia didn’t always have access to expensive Western goodies like Coca-Cola. Instead, they made their own version, Cockta, which is still sold today throughout Montenegro. Coca-Cola’s flavour formula is of course a very closely guarded secret, so it was probably unreasonable to expect Tito’s top beverage scientists to get the taste even vaguely approximate, but it’s still quite surprising when you try your first Cockta just how much it doesn’t taste even remotely like Coke. It’s more like Vimto, but less sugary. Odd, but actually quite refreshing on a hot day.

Vranac

Mmmmmmm. Vranac. Montenegro’s true gift to the world, this lovely, adaptable red wine is, frankly, superb. Oaked is best (kind of like a heavier rioja), but even young, home-made Vranac is perfectly acceptable table wine, and it generally costs less than 3 a bottle. Occasionally we do hanker after a Pinot Noir or a proper Rioja, but that’s just because we’re being fussy. Vranac is awesome, and the fact that so little of it is exported should tell you all you need to know. You hang on to the good stuff.

Of course, Montenegro’s home products can’t all be winners. In the interests of balance, here are few things I wish I hadn’t come across and which you won’t ever have to now that I’ve described them…

Puding

Freddy calls this custard. It isn’t. It’s sort of a cross between blancmange and really slimy creme brule, and you can eat it ready-made like a yoghurt or make it yourself by adding milk to a powder. It comes in brown, yellow, pink and red flavours and only has a discernible taste when you choose the vanilla variant. It’s rubbish.

Rastan

Sort of a cross between spinach, kale and cabbage, it’s used to make a snot-coloured stew that usually has bits of processed sausage floating in it. About as appetising as it sounds.

Dried fish

Usually ukljeva, or bleak, this is a Skadar Lake speciality. I’d only ever seen this sort of thing for sale in pet stores before. Accidentally pop some in your fridge like we did and the smell will linger for weeks. I've no idea what happens if you actually eat it. I've been too afraid to try.

And so to the build - wassap with that? Well, our slab is laid, and in between frequent showers our team have managed to get the forming boards up for the ground floor supporting walls.

Additionally, yesterday saw three trades all working harmoniously together as first fix electrics and plumbing were put in place prior to concreting.

There was - as often can happen - a brief interlude during the morning as we hurriedly had to replace our elected plumber (on account of him flouncing off in a huff for reasons too dull to go into here), but the ever efficient Imzo got on the phone and within the hour we had a substitute in place, a nice chap called Zare who even spoke a little German, aiding pipe placement no end. Sadly, it's now tipping it down again so the walls will have to wait a day or two...

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...

Wouldn't it be luvverly...?

It's been hinted at in blogs past. It’s been avoided for years. It’s been difficult to find. But now, finally, after an exhaustive search (and only slightly less exhausting process) we have finally found somewhere to live in Virpazar

“Eh?” I hear you saying (well, not saying, but you know what I mean). Haven’t you lot been in that neck of the woods for 5 years now? Built a house or something? What about that little place?

Well, here’s the rub: we do indeed have a lovely restored stone villa at Lake Skadar. We also have a lovely restored stone house on Vis Island, Croatia. We even have a not quite so lovely unrestored house in Norwich, UK  – and we can’t live in any of them.

Norwich is obviously rented out long term, and serves as our insurance policy should we ever royally bugger this up and have to return to Blighty. Vis is rented out very successfully during the summer, but we are naturally precluded from living at either of these properties simply because they are not where our business is. Unfortunately, the house we built at Lake Skadar only has four bedrooms, and because we’re filling these bedrooms with guests for most of the year, that means we always have to find somewhere else to live during the summer.

Here’s where we lived for a three weeks in summer 2011 before we grabbed a granny with a slightly nicer flat just down the road...

 

We nicknamed it the bunker, and that’s more or less all it was, a near bombed out concrete block with one bedroom, one bathroom and one living room/kitchen, down in the valley overlooked by the villa. Yikes.

Summer 2012 was spent in a half finished – but spacious and well-equipped – flat in a local village 5 minutes drive from Virpazar, situated next to a pig shed and with no railings on its main balcony. Still, it did at least have a grassy yard for our paddling pool, and Freddy enjoyed running our holiday business for us inside....

 



This last place was kindly rented to us at the last minute by a friend who moved out to accommodate us, so it was a one-summer only deal. For this summer, we knew we would have to find a more permanent alternative. Our criteria were simple: clean, 2 bedrooms, within 5 minutes of Virpazar, not stupidly expensive (for here). The problem was and is that options in Virpazar are pretty thin on the ground even if you remove all of these stipulations. We saw shitholes of all sizes, in all conditions, at all prices, from €200/month for a dilapidated house 10 minutes away to €600/m (!) for a tiny flat in the centre of the village.

Half decent is the best we were likely to do here, and the only way to keep the extortionate rents down (on the coast you’ll likely be paying half what we have to, such does supply outstrip demand) was to go for something long-term. This actually suits us for reasons I’ll explain shortly - so what we’ve managed to secure for 24 months is this:





Yep, that little cottage right on the waterfront. Two bedrooms, nice and spacious, in need of a bit (ok, a lot) of TLC, outside space, parking for both cars, right in the centre of Virpazar and with the best views, bar none, of any place in town.



We're paying too much for it, but actually, the thought of moving out of the villa and into here is quite appealing to us. We have had broadband installed. We won’t need to jump in the car every time we forget to buy bread. We’ll have space to store all our kayaks and business paraphernalia. Freddy can have his own room - for a few months or so anyway. From this time next year, he might already be having to share, because in true Heywood fashion, we’ve gone and set ourselves a whole new challenge just when we appeared to have settled into the small matter of running a successful business somewhere most people have never heard of.

Freddy’s getting not ONE, but TWO siblings.

The science of twins is somewhat debated – apparently, contrary to popular belief, it’s actually only unidentical twins that get passed on on a genetic level from generation to generation. Identical twins, according to those clever people with medical degrees and long white coats, is pure chance, the result of a sperm fertilising one egg that splits in two rather than the result of two eggs being produced at the same time. Identical twins are flukes, then. Nothing you can do about it, that’s just the way fate goes.

Tim and Jonny Heywood, b 2/12/1948 – my father and uncle.

 

Jessica and Joanna Heywood, b 14/06/1988 – my sisters.

 

Doctors talk a right load of bollocks, don’t they?

Just as well we’ve signed up to the cottage for 2 years, because it’s now going to take a little longer to save up for our new dwelling on account of it now needing to be somewhat larger than anticipated. We’ve been sketch-upping (can I do that, use it as a verb?) lots to try and figure out the most cost-effective way to enlarge what was originally supposed to be a subtle second building on our land, as well as trying to forecast when exactly we might be able to pay for it all. The answer is…not quite as quickly as we’d previously thought!

So we’re almost ready for the season. The villa is prepped and ready, and thanks to some awesome friends a couple of weeks ago, the garden is even looking tamed, mostly because we removed around seven cubic metres of junk from the grounds. We’ve got cherry blossom already and we even got the hot tub working, finally…

 

Well, sort of working. Marko and I were the only ones prepared to give it a go at around 11pm, five hours after we started heating it. It was…lukewarm. Alarmed at this less than Germanic efficiency, I emailed the guys I bought it from in Kettenacker and asked if they had any tips. Had I covered the tub, they asked.

Ah. Ahem. Er…

I’ve since had a good many people remind me that a saucepan of water boils much faster if you pop a lid on it, and that, evidently, the same principle applies to hot-tubs. Yeah, thanks people, I get it now. We’ve got a 200cm diameter cover on order as we speak.

It’s a familiar result: Science 1 (Physics, 2min), Ben 0. Next time, we cover (hoho) Chemistry. If you don’t want to know the score, please look away now…

Tools for the job

There are two kinds of DIYer – the perfectionist and the bodger. There’s no middle ground – by definition if something is not done perfectly it is done imperfectly and an imperfect job can only ever be a bodge. That’s not to say that there aren’t degrees of bodgery. It’s a dark art that has many forms, from the slapdash to the ingenious. I’m sure by now you can guess that I am not a perfectionist.

My stepfather Dave and my father-in-law Mike are. They properly research the job at hand, select the correct tools for the job and then go about their work with meticulous detail. The advantage of this approach is that you get exactly what you are after, and you know that it’ll work. The disadvantages to this approach are that a) it tends to take time (ask Dave what time it is and he’ll explain how to build a watch) and b) it is usually impossible in Montenegro for logistical, material and temporal reasons. Mike recoiled in horror one time when I was securing a fitting of pipe with a pair of pliers rather than a plumbers’ wrench, but the reality was that I would have had to drive 30km to buy one, and this was time I didn’t have. In Montenegro, you’ll be forced into bodgery because you can’t find what you need (KIPS and OKOV between them deserve –and have received – blog posts of their own detailing their inadequacies), the correct tool might not exist (good luck finding a pull-saw in Montenegro) and you might only have a limited amount of time to solve your problem.

This is how I have wound up cleaning our mouldy Skoda’s interior with a child’s toothbrush (nothing else would get into those hard to reach places), nailing together plastic sheeting and pallets from a rubbish tip to make a waterproof woodshed, using a dustpan and brush to clean and bail out our hot tub of dirt and rainwater and rigging up a plastic barrel with a hose, tap and spray gun so that guests can shower off before using the tub – none of these obvious, or optimum, solutions to the problems at hand. Oh, and I’ve finally succeeded in pumping water from the spring at the bottom of our garden into our reservoir at the top.

This last item is actually worthy of further explanation.

Our villa is not connected to the mains, for reasons to dull to go into at length (search May 2009 or so if you really want details) so we rely on water being pumped from our reservoir, underneath the car parking, via what is known here as a hidrofor. A hidrofor is a pump that uses bladder pressure to supply the whole house with equally pressured water – ie, there ought to be no drop in pressure of all four showers are used at once, say. Hidrofors are simple things with very few moving parts, the idea being that they should be next to maintenance free once installed. Naturally ours went wrong continually last year until we finally found a reliable electrician to sort it out (thanks, Novo). As for the reservoir itself – well, the problem is that it’s not big enough. It’s not big enough because back in 2008 our first builder, Bolimir the Bad – definitely a bodger – talked me out of putting the reservoir underneath the terrace for “structural reasons” that unsurprisingly turned out to be a load of old bollocks. Instead of a 70,000 litre tank that easily captured our rainwater from the drainpipes, then, we wound up with a 16,000 litre tank 30 metres away that had no rain capture and no other feed either. Thanks, Bolimir, curse your voluminous arse.

After one summer of getting our reservoir continually filled up by truck, we decided that things had to change once and for all, so when Mike was here last October I decided to make use of his degree in engineering to brainstorm a solution which – to his dismay and my glee – turned out to be the most sublime of bodges. First, I rigged up a rain-recycling system that would take rainwater in winter and deposit it in our undersized tank. It worked a treat. Bravo, me! The problem was what do in summer, when the tank ran dry.

Down at the bottom of our garden is a natural spring. Present on this site for several hundred years, it gushes natural mineral water right up until about mid-October, when it too has to wait for the rains again. It was one of the main reasons we bought the house in the first place. The difficulties were twofold if we wanted to use it to fill up our reservoir. First of all, we had to pump the water 35m back up the hill, which required a pretty strong pump. Secondly, the trough into which the water emptied held only about 200 litres, and a pretty strong pump would empty it in about a minute and a half, faster than it would fill up again in summer. Oh, and the trough was full of holes.

The bodge Mike and I came up with was this: situate a strong pump right next to the spring, and attach the feed not to the trough, but to the tap (which had a flow rate of at least 20l/min) to ensure continuous flow. We would then force the highly pressurised water up the hill via a series of valves that would be half closed, thus forcing the water to travel more slowly and ensure that it would reach the reservoir, but do so slowly enough to never leave the pump “breathing” air (which would knacker it).*

We could then manually top up our tank overnight, say, in the height of summer. It was a theoretically perfect solution to a problem that no-one had ever bothered or needed to solve before. My speciality!

 

And yes, that is a dog kennel the pump’s living in.  

Back in mid-October I spent a week crawling through brambles laying pipe and cable and literally 30 seconds after completing the work, the ****ing spring ran dry. At that stage I broke the world record for continuous inventive swearing, breaking the old record also held by me.

So that’s the science bit. And the reason I’ve bored you so about it? Well, we hooked it up again this week now that the spring is in full flow, and it only ****ing works!! The bodger’s bodger, son of a bodger and in all likelihood himself father to a future bodger, had put something together that actually worked!

And I just thought I should tell the world about it, that’s all. Well, the half a dozen people reading this, anyway.

The rest of my time has been taken up with – after pointlessly complicated DIY – my favourite activity in the world: dealing with Montenegrin bureaucracy. Imagine the stupidest system, run by the stupidest government, adhering to the stupidest set of rules ever devised by King Stupid the 28^th of Stupidville (apologies Richard Curtis), and you’re getting close to describing the experience of dealing with Montenegrin paperwork.

This is how you get a “zdravstvena knjizica”, or to non-Srpski speakers, the little green book that entitles you to free healthcare through the contributions you pay employing yourself through your own company.

-           Get your residency permit, work permit, passport and company contract - and several b/w copies of each - and go to Schalter 6 at Bar Opstina to get your little grey work permit book stamped at 11am sharp when they open.
-           Hand over your documents. You get a pink slip with €2 of tax to pay. -           Head back out of the opstina to the post office, the only place where you can pay this €2 tax. Queue for 30 minutes. Fill out another form, hand over €2 and your pink slip. You get a yellow slip.
-          Take this yellow slip back to Schalter 6. Wait another 20 minutes after rejoining the queue, and trade it for your little grey work permit book.
-          Go to Schalter 9 and hand it over with all the other documents. Wait 20 minutes.
-          Head back out of the opstina over the road to a nearby copy-shop to photocopy your passport again, because they need another copy.
-          Rejoin the queue for Schalter 9 and hand over your documents again.
-          Head back out of the Opstina because they need a different kind of work contract that you didn’t know about.
-          Find a “knjizara”, buy a 10 cent copy of the standard worker contract. Fill it out. Badly.
-          Rejoin the queue at Schalter 9. Have the fed up lady at Schalter 9 fill it out for you. This will endear you to her even more.
-          Receive a two page document that needs an official opstina stamp on it.
-          Leave the building a third time to find office 215, which is where you get the stamp for this new document. Stamping this document is not the lady at Schalter 9’s job. Queue outside the door, get the stamp.
-          Return to Schalter 9 with the stamp to get the pink slip to pay your €5 tax.
-          The woman working at Schalter 9 tells you that if you want to get your wife and child registered through your employment she will need proof of ID for them. You proffer their passports and are told that these won’t be sufficient. You explain that 200 nations around the globe say different, and ask why Montenegro does not consider a passport proof of ID.
-          Try really hard not to swear/scream/tear the opstina down with your bare hands when you are told that you need to submit a copy of your marriage certificate and child’s birth certificate. Which you don’t have with you.
-          Explain that both of these English documents have the following phrase in capitals all over them – “THIS CERTIFICATE IS NOT PROOF OF IDENTITY”.
-          See above entry but one.
-          Somehow avoid total meltdown when the lady informs you that as it is now 1pm, the Schalter is shut until tomorrow.

-          Return to Schalter 9 at 11am the next day to get your pink slip. Hand over copies of aforementioned certificates.

-          Head back out of the opstina to the post office, the only place where you can pay this €5 tax. Queue for 30 minutes. Fill out another form, hand over €5 and your pink slip. You get a yellow slip.
-          Take this yellow slip back to Schalter 9. Wait another 20 minutes after rejoining the queue, and trade it for your 2 page document again.
-          Now head off to the Fond Zdravstveno in the centre of Bar. Hand over your document and tell the lady you’d like your little green books stamped, please.
-          Club the bitch to death when she tells you that you can come back in 2 days to collect them because she has a “pauza” now and then the office shuts for the day.
-          Not really. An eye roll or two usually suffices at this stage.
-          Come back two days later to collect your little green books.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here



Now, you could sit a dimmer-than-average rhesus monkey down at a desk, keep it tripped out on tamazapam and ask it to type up a set of legal documents in whatever language it felt appropriate and you would still not come up with a system as bafflingly idiotic as that which every resident of Montenegro has to go through every time they want anything with an official stamp on it. There are ancient carved stones that have been kept in 3000yr old amphoras that make more sense than this. Even Lost makes more sense than this. And in May I have to go back and get our visas renewed. Pray for me.

Next time: we move house again and get our hot tub working (we hope)!

*those of you muttering “what about self-priming pumps?” ought to know that such a thing is – unbelievably – not available anywhere in Montenegro.