The Blue Monkey Review

We are talking in the Piccadilly Café, in Podgorica (where I have returned in spite of the continued bad weather--the roads, at least, were better this time). Nina has already taught English in Podgorica for a semester, in the economics and law faculty. But in the three years preceding this, she has taught in Uzbekistan, Korea, and Bulgaria. So her observations about Montenegro are sharpened by her experience of other cultures.

"Did you choose Montenegro?" We both ask the other more one or less the same question. For both of us it turns out that Montenegro, more or less, chose us.

It is quite an education to spend the day with Nina. As we walk around the central area of Podgorica, a city of about 170,000, she expresses her confidence that we will find a place for coffee and later for lunch. "The whole city is a café," she says, "that's all there is to do here." We walk across a wide stretch of the city in about twenty minutes, cross the main square (which functions now as a parking lot) and through Hercegovacka Ulica, a pedestrian street of shops and cafes. We attract a lot of attention together. She's someone who makes Montenegrin heads turn. She's a California girl, so of course she's attractive (Beach Boys? Hello!). But Montenegrin pause in their conversation to look not because Nina is Californian, but because she is also Korean.

"Do you feel kind of exotic here?" I ask.

"Yes, and it feels very strange. It isn't so bad today because I'm with a white person. But when I walk around on my own people look and even say things to me. Children will stop playing and run after me. I feel like they are making fun of me." In Bulgaria, she tells me, even though people noticed her, they would never let on that they noticed.

We talk about the insularity of the country. It's hard to get here, for one thing, but the people seem to live in a kind of bubble that separates them from many of the currents that Eastern Europe and even other parts of the Balkans have felt. One of the currents that has transformed Europe since the 1960s is the growing diversity of European society. Parts of Berlin and Paris are overwhelmingly Muslim, and people whose parents came from Africa now speak German, Italian, French, or English as their first languages. You would never mistake the Frankfurt airport for JFK, but the mixture of Germans working there whose parents never heard of Adenauer or even Willy Brandt is striking. None of this applies to Montenegro. A small number of Chinese live in Montenegro where they operate little Kina Butik filled with inexpensive clothing. But the only sizeable minority here is the Roma (Gypsies).

The race issue has made an appearance as a topic in my class. One student asked me if it was true that black people in the United States have to live in separate communities.

"That's true in many places," I tell her.

Another student volunteers that the same thing exists in Montenegro, with the Roma. But that's different, said another. They want to live that way.

I didn't know enough to comment and was uneasy about exploring the topic at that moment. But I cannot very well teach American history without discussing race. Some of these issues will come up again.

Later on we meet Goran joins Nina and I. He teaches Serbian at the campus in Niksic. Goran lived in the United States, in Knoxville, for a year. He likes the United States very much, and has even become an advocate for Knoxville. He points out that it had an important part in the film Pulp Fiction.

"So, did you choose to come to Montenegro?" he asks soon after he sits down. Once again I explain the mysteries of Fulbright selection.

As we talk Goran also asks me what I think of the library in Niksic. Well, it has its problems. The collection is a little long in the tooth. And then there's the problem about the card catalog. Goran explains: "They moved the books from one place to another, but they lost the catalog. And they don't make a new catalog." For Goran this is a sad joke, especially as he compares the Niksic library to the libraries at the University of Tennesse. But Goran also has ideas about new classes and even new curriculum, and he hopes to have time to make some of these things happen when he finishes his dissertation. To make his program more up to date, more like a western program, he only lacks time, help, and almost all other resources.

As the taxi driver said when I first arrived in Niksic, "It's not really Europe. It's Montenegro." That sums up a big part of my impression after three weeks. Montenegro seems so familiar in so many ways, yet at the same time baffles my expectations.