The Blue Monkey Review

I spent much of the day traveling, taking a bus from Niksic to Podgorica, and then from Podgorica to Cetinje. Cetinje had been the capital city after Montenegro became an independent kingdom in 1878 (as a result of the Berlin Congress). Another failure of imagination had left me unable to believe any place could have more snow piled up than Niksic. In Niksic snow is everywhere, still covering many of the sidewalks and offering pedestrians the choice a crunching through granulated snow or finding traction where the cars do. But in Cetinje the snow is everywhere and it is far higher than in Niksic, piled higher than me in most places.

As a consequence of this I only managed to see a few of the interesting sights in the former capital--the royal palace and some of the abandoned embassy buildings, the Spirit of Lovcen monument and Cetinje monastery. Everything is closed, of course. It is Sunday, it is winter, and the snow makes every movement difficult. Still, I will certainly return to Cetinje in better weather, and on a weekday.

All of the most impressive buildings, the monastery excepted, date to the 19th century. As Janko has told me more than once, Montenegro really didn't have cities until almost the end of the 19th century, and few then. The Montenegrins spent too much of their time fighting the Turks, and Cetinje served as the final stop for most of the failed invasions. They burned down the entire city in 1714 before retreating, though that makes a less spectacular story than the invasion in 1692 when they broke into the fortress only to have the defenders blow up the entire building.

The bus makes very little progress before three middle-aged men in overalls get on. One ends up sitting next to me and immediately asks me something. He has to repeat it before I figure out that he wants to know if we are "going by way of the new road?" I am processing his words and trying to formulate something helpful in response, but in Serbian "by way of the new road" is novi putom, and several years of studying Spanish make it impossible for me to hear this without having it sound strange. And, I don't know if we are going novi putom or stari putom, so I'm useless to this guy. But at least we communicate, though he becomes fairly quiet when he realizes I am not exactly fluent.

In Cetinje I'd had the usual, daily kinds of exchanges. I had coffee at the Yellow Moon Café (not a translation) and then at the Korzo Café. I know enough now to order from the snack menu. The meals here include more food that I eat in a day, and more meat than I eat in a month. From what limited traveling I have done, I judge this to be the most meat intensive diet I've ever encountered. Janko, who is a vegetarian, says offhandedly that there are probably 10 vegetarians in Montenegro. The only others that I have met came from the U.S. or western Europe.

The bus rides between Cetinje and Pdgorica, and Podgorica and Niksic offered me better views of the landscape than I've had before. Much of the snow has melted until you are close to the two mountain valleys where Cetinje and Podgorica lie, so I had a better sense of the terrain. Much of the mountain soil has eroded away, and especially near Cetinje the mountain passes reveal sheets of rocks, one layer on top of another but each layer clearly marked with horizontal fissures. From a distance it looks like a careful child has staked building blocks.

The soil lost from the mountain slopes makes its way into the valleys, I suppose, giving Montenegrins fertile land where they produce an abundance of fruits and vegetables (the reason kiwi fruit costs so little here is that it is grown here). But the rich soil itself is not so abundant. From the bus window I could see some valley floors, with stone or concrete block houses topped by tile roofs. The flat land at the bottom of the valley was subdivided by many fences, leaving plots that looked like they were the size of large gardens. Some parts of the the valley were terraced or graded, but these did not climb the sides of the valley the way it would near an Inca city.

The bus back to Niksic makes steady progress and I can see busses coming in the opposite direction. I finally convinced myself that whatever 58 referred to, it wasn't the amount of snow that had fallen on Niksic. I also notice two girls sitting in a seat on the other side of the bus aisle. They doze leaning on one another, and later wake up and fool around very affectionately. If I were riding a bus in New Jersey or Pittsburgh I'd assume they are lesbians, and way out of the closet. But I don't assume that here. In fact, according to On the Go, homosexuality is treated with hostility outside of Belgrade. But girls here express affection and friendship for one another in clearly physical ways, as I've noted before. This applies to a lesser extent to boys, but even so they lack inhibitions about closeness that would result in peer sanctions in the high schools of Westmoreland County, PA.

We finally arrive in Niksic and it appears no snowier than when I'd left. I get up and shuffle along the aisle when one of the girls taps me on the shoulder and asks me something. I don't expect this and react even more cluelessly than usual. I can't even tell if she is talking to me in Serbian. She points at something and all I can guess is that she saw me leave my wallet on my seat. More clueless-ness from me. She gives up with a smile, but I say, "Do you speak any English?"

Her friend responds, "Oh, yes. Where did you buy your shoes?"

"I bought them in the states," I say.

"They're great!"

These Vasque boots, with their Gore-Tex lining, have been great. In spite of walking daily through slush, puddles, and moving water, my feet and socks remain dry. Conditions here can't compare to the Inca Trail, but, at least when I was on it, the Inca Trail was dry. But, I never thought of them as making a fashion statement. I thank her for mentioning this.