The Blue Monkey Review

A lot of my travel time had been spent just waiting around. Most of my day was in the Frankfurt airport. This place would have been the airport of tomorrow in 1955. It"s not that it isn"t up to date, but it is all steel and hard surfaces. Naturally I was eager to leave as soon as Montenegro Airlines would take me. But, after my 10:30 AM arrival, I had to wait until 1:30 PM for the Montenegro check-in to open. MA doesn"t have a regular window in Frankfurt, so I had to keep asking around to identify the correct place to go. I was pretty pleased to finally determine where to go and then to see someone there doing check-in warm-up behavior.

But, that was when the real adventure began. Turns out that the flight to Podgorica, the major city in Montenegro, was canceled. Weather problems. I would hear much more about that in the next 24 hours. So instead of flying to Podgorica, the plane was destined for Tivat. But to get the real story I had to go to another window.

As I made that move I somehow fell in with a German of Montenegrin descent, Janko Petrovic. Janko is a big man, robust, energetic. For the rest of my trip to Montenegro I would follow along in Janko"s wake. And a good thing. I"d still be in Frankfurt or Belgrade of somewhere not quite part of Montenegro without Janko.

At the Montenegro window Janko and I learned that we couldn"t exactly go to Tivat that day, either, but that they would put us onto a Yugoslav Air (JAT) flight to Belgrade, and then we could fly to Tivat tomorrow. That idea didn"t sound all that attractive, and Janko was not in mind to hang around Belgrade. But at least we"d be moving in the direction of Montenegro and away from Frankfurt airport. As it turned out, that plan had to change because the airport in Tivat was also out of commission, the tower struck by lightening"and would be closed for several days.

So after we arrived in Belgrade, Janko engaged in a lot of discussion in Serbian with the people associated with Montenegrin Air, and we determined that they would transport us to the train station for the train to Podgorica. At this turn of the wheel we also, somehow, fell in with a couple, Zenl and Vera, who have a radio station in Ulcinj. The four of us were most of the people who took the bus to the train station.

Once we arrived at the train station we stepped into a world or Orson Welles-ian sets. The train station looked like a third world post office, and was about as efficient, except that here the weather was bitterly cold. It was below freezing outside and below freezing inside. I watched the luggage as my new-found pals went from window to window figuring out our travel arrangements. Even knowing the language and culture as they did, they dealt with three different clerks and it took more than half an hour to make the arrangements. As it happened, they made all the right decisions. We reserved for the four or us a six-person sleeping compartment.

By then it was about 7 PM and we could not board our train until 10. So, we headed out into the night to find a restaurant. I should mention here that I was not traveling light, as I usually do. In fact, I|m not traveling at all but moving to a new place. So I had my backpack suitcase AND a large rolling suitcase. It isn"t big enough to hold a piano. It could probably hold a piano player. But in traveling from Pittsburgh to Montenegro, I had assumed that I would need to deal with the suitcase only when I transferred it from United to Montenegro Air. Instead, I had to drag, carry, and deadlift that monster for hours. From the train station to the restaurant was not that far as the crow flies, but no crow in its right mind would have been flying in Belgrade that night. The suitcase went over curbs and through snow. I stopped worrying about it.

The restaurant we found looked to me like a big, well-lit Italian restaurant except not as well decorated. Half of the place was packed, and the other half less heavily settled. The crowd tended toward the more mature, most of them probably having grown to adulthood, married, and had children under Comrade Tito. A few had grandchildren before Tito died. And almost everyone in the place, our table excepted, was a music lover. The traditional music performed there was something between Zorba the Greek and Hassidic pop. The air hung heavy with a haze of cigarette smoke. Were we there to eat or to find a clue to the third man?

We had a nice, warm meal, including beer for me and a carrot soup that would have broken the heart of a vegeterian. Then, after spending as much time as we thought we could, we headed back across the square to the train station. We made our way out to the platform at almost 10. There, before me, was another movie set, except that a movie set would have been cleaner and warmer. It looked like a Cold War museum piece, with old trains, snow, and the Communist absence of movement. When we finally boarded the train I recalled that 30 years ago the Yugoslav rolling stock all seemed to have been purchased at second hand from the French or Italian lines. And these were the same cars!

But we didn"t board at 10, or 11. It must have been about midnight when our train finally arrived and I had to drag the piano case down the platform and wrestle it onto the train. We found our compartment, made up our beds, and squeezed into them as the train pulled into the Serbian night. I thought better of having drunk that beer after my second (but not last) visit to the toilet (30 years had not improved the amenities there, either). But finally, about 2 AM I settled into a deep sleep.

I woke up a short five hours later in Montenegro. The train was due into Podgorica at 8, but didn"t arrive until 9:30. So I had a couple of hours to see the mountainous terrain covered with snow. We could have been in the Rockies. Janko told me that he"d never seen snow in Montenegro. So it occurred to me then, do I have bad luck, or do I bring it? Can this small country survive having me live there for five months?