#1: Undestination
Hello. Here be dragons, or, in other words, streams of consciousness and random pictures, perhaps more often unrelated than otherwise.
My friends asked me to keep them posted. My English teacher asked to spam her with photos. I wanted to overcome my creative blocks. And though I know creativeness doesn’t work when you’re stressed, I still decided to give it a try. 30 minutes a day. One day at a time.
So, how did it all start?
I had a plan. The objective was to finally escape Mordor in a couple of months. There was an unfortunate complication: I’ve got a bit too many things to carry in my backpack — musical instruments that would barely fit into the trunk of a regular car. A bit less of a problem was that the borders were basically closed due to COVID. So the plan was to get vaccinated with a recognised vaccine to open borders. After that I would return and finish the story with the driving licence, purchase an inexpensive car with a good trunk, load it with instruments, renew my visas and go wherever it would make at least some little sense to.
I failed. Or, let’s say, the universe has made a fool of me again, just as it usually happens in recent years when I try to ‘plan’ things.
A couple of days before the departure, the self-acclaimed ‘government’ started a war. I decided to still try and stick to the plan. But then, being all scared and uncertain, me and my team at work decided that it’d be better for me to stay in Europe for a while, because it seemed quite possible, that returned I would not be able to leave the country again, and it was all clear that now our company had to be relocated to a more peaceful jurisdiction as soon as possible.
Castle in Rijeka
I stayed for two weeks in Croatia, quite unsuccessfully trying to find some peace of mind. Learning once again to write music with only a computer. Trying to remember how to program again, just to distract my always I-need-to-be-creating-something mind from the absence of musical instruments.
I couldn’t find any friends in Croatia. Zagreb was just all so busy and noisy. Rijeka appeared to be a resort. Split — the same, elderly people and lazy tourists. Dubrovnik — same. The nature — beautiful, mountains — gorgeous, sea — mesmerising, but people — not at all open and friendly. I admit, that it could be just me, looking alienated because of the situation, but rationally thinking — I guess, the main problem was the language, not many speak English in there.
Then I moved to Montenegro, of which I heard a lot of good things. Bar — the first city I planned to stay in for some time disappointed me before I even got off the bus. Again, huge wonderful mountains, but the city — not cosy at all, and just so much garbage everywhere: torn plastic bags, cans, bottles, whatever you can imagine when you hear ‘garbage’ — everywhere.
Architecture? No, there’s no architecture at all. Podgorica — mostly the same. Budva — cool at the first sight, but once you look closer — it’s just the same. Ulcinj — where I decided to stay for a week — it’s basically a southern-asian city, there’s something interesting in it, and a cool fortress that was built by pirates. But it looks abandoned and forgotten. Not like I’m blaming people — they only recently reclaimed their independence as a country. It’s clear that COVID basically destroyed their tourist-based economy. But, well, at the end of the day, it all doesn’t look like a good place to stay and recover. Or maybe I’m just too broken.
It reminds me of the 90’s in Russia — you can rarely find modern-looking/thinking people here. What would you say about a bus-driver smoking while driving a bus and refusing to stop? Or other car and bus drivers racing on the winding mountain roads — WikiVoyage says Montenegro has the highest car accident rate in Europe. Hosts on AirBnb don’t care to check their schedules carefully, so you can end up looking for another place to stay on arrival. Internet connection? Slow and glitchy. Cafés and restaurants? (Post-)Soviet-like. Music? Some weird mixture of low-quality pos-soviet chanson-like pop and Balkan motives.
Well, at least most things are relatively inexpensive here. And in Ulcinj, I was finally lucky to find a local gem — a place with decent music, inexpensive healthy and delicious food and nice waiters who even helped me to acquire some cash in exchange for my bitcoins. I visit this place every day now.
My next un-destination will be Tivat. There’s an airport which I’ll need soon.
