Montenegrin pljeskavica

Montenegro is cheap.  I spent a fortune in Italy.  Although Montenegro is de facto in the euro zone, its economy is not tied to the other euro zone nations; it simply adopted the euro unilaterally.  This goes a small way to explaining why a half litre of beer in Montenegro costs €1.20 and three or four times that in Italy.

At a bar in Bar, I ordered an omelette.  I just got off the ferry from Bari, Italy, and wanted some breakfast while waiting for the train to Podgorica.  The waiter indicated in Serbian that they had no eggs.  I really only ordered it because the word for omelette is omlet, one of only two words on the menu I could understand.  Since the other was hamburger, I ordered that.  He indicated they had no hamburgers.  Off to a rollicking start, this breakfast.  He recommended pljeskavica instead.  "What's pljeskavica?" I asked, and he rattled off something in Serbian and made a shape with his hands.  I shrugged and said, "okay."  I was just hungry.  When travelling, it makes things a lot easier to eat adventurously, and I'm not by nature a fussy eater.  I was ready to try whatever Montenegrin cuisine had to throw at me.

The waiter brought me my pljeskavica.  It was a hamburger.

Locked out

A man in a uniform tapped me on the shoulder.  "Are you still waiting?" he said, and pointed to the carousel.  "All the luggage is out."

I can't say I was surprised.  I rerouted my luggage in Istanbul so it would arrive in Sydney.  The delay of my whitewater rafting trip meant I had to fly from Sarajevo, Bosnia, to rendezvous with my Istanbul flight.  The Sarajevo to Istanbul leg was not included in my original itinerary, so my luggage had to be retagged for Sydney.  It was my oversight—I should have explained this when I checked in in Bosnia—but I thought I resolved it when I spoke to the Turkish Airlines flight transfer desk in Istanbul.  After all, both flights were with Turkish Air.

"Sir, you have two options," said the bloke at the transfer desk.  "You can go out passport control"—he gestured to a deep and wide drove of bodies being herded through the barrier ropes like cattle at a feedlot—"collect your luggage from the carousel and check it onto your next flight...."

"Or?" I interrupted, already deciding on option number two.

"Or I can do it for you."

These are my options?  Do I also have the choice to get my own meals on the plane?  "So, you'll go out and collect my luggage, which is right now on the conveyor belt, and put it on the plane for me?"

"Yes sir.  I'll take care of it myself."

"That's it?  Great!" I said, pleased with this efficiency.  "Teşekkür ederim!"


When I recounted this story to the lady at the lost baggage counter in Sydney, she said: "Don't believe them."  She looked up lost baggage in Istanbul and, sure enough, my backpack was still there, I imagine circulating alone on a carousel in a deserted terminal.  "It should get here in 48 hours."


All of this was really just a minor nuisance.  After all, I was home.  Except that when I got home, I realised my house keys were in my backpack.


@#$!

Stand by...

What a shock to the system it is to return to "the real world" after seven weeks on the road.  The Monster of Banality assaulted me with laundry, groceries and bills, and in the few frail moments of my escape I was trapped by the inexorable Tentacles of Television.  This leaves me with still outstanding stories for this blog, including whitewater rafting, tendonitis, and navigating live minefields.

Stay tuned.

Injury

I have had the most excruciating ache in my arm for the last two days, enough to keep me awake at night.  I don’t normally take painkillers for headaches and such, but I’ve been popping Panadol to get some relief and attempt to sleep.  The first night they didn’t seem to work, but I suppose without any Panadol at all it would have been worse.  The only other time I was ever kept awake by pain is when I broke my wrist.

How did I do this?  By holding my phone.  In my room in Lecce I had to hold it against the wall to get a Wi-Fi signal, and I did emails and blogs and bookings for 45 minutes in that position.  It is bizarre and ridiculous.  It didn’t seem like anything at the time, but that’s what isolated pilates on one underused forearm muscle can do.  I’ve been in agony.

And this just days before whitewater rafting.

Delayed broadcast

I have a few more brief stories to tell, but I’m currently in Montenegro preparing to go camping and whitewater rafting for three days.  Following this I make a lightning trip to Sarajevo to catch a flight to Istanbul (the rafting was delayed so I have to forgo Macedonia, Bulgaria, and even my Turkish hammam, damn it), and then I catch my flight home.  I’ll round out the trip blog with all those stories (and whatever the rafting holds), but these will likely be after I get back to Sydney on August 8th.

Galatina

Galatina’s Basilica di Santa Caterina has the most vivid frescoes I’ve ever seen, and for this fact alone I can’t understand why the town doesn’t draw more people.  I went back twice to see them all.  Galatina is a pleasant little town in its own right, but perhaps there just isn’t enough to keep tourists occupied.  It is certainly quiet.  So quiet, in fact, that between the hours of 12.30pm and 4.30pm it is actually closed. 

I wandered within the small boundary of the old town for hours and found no one but a few stragglers.  I was completely puzzled.  I asked the guy at the hotel about it and he told me this is the region’s four-to-five-hour-long siesta.  “It’s too hot to stay open,” he said.  I think it was about 28°C.

These hours are when I’m at my most mobile, exploring places I am passing through, but all the small towns of Salento close.  Even the restaurants!  I don’t know how people eat.  Apparently they sleep.  And when, starving, I find a place miraculously open at 3pm, they say lunch is over and they’re no longer serving food.

That night in Galatina I ate at one of the best restaurants on the entire trip – not because of the standard of the food, but because of the experience.  I saw the sign for La Tana del Lupo in an alley near my hotel earlier in the day.  When dinner time came, then, I walked straight in through the door and almost turned over tables, plates and guests.  There were exactly four tables, one free, in a living room.  There was a kitchen two paces away, I think there was a broom closet with a toilet in it, and that was it.  There wasn’t even room for a menu.  I sat down and the waiter (who is the cook’s husband) brought me bottled water and a stoppered bottle of rosé and asked me if I was very hungry or just a little.  That’s the choice: apart from this, you get what you’re given.  Which is wonderful southern Italian home cooking.

The living room had a vaulted ceiling, and the walls were filled with family photos, bottles of wine, pewter jugs, dried chilis, paintings, and shelves of curios and ornaments.  Two families somehow fit at two of the other tables, and there was a solo bloke behind me in the corner.  The animated husband moved between the tables and spoke to the diners, regaling everyone with funny stories (I assume, since everyone was laughing).  He spoke a little broken English with me and I a little broken Italian with him, and then plates came: cold antipasto (pickled onions, zucchini and eggplant in olive oil, soft cheese), then hot antipasto (fritters of vegetables and a bacon-flavoured egg frittata), then handmade pasta shells in broccoli sauce (scuisito!), then veal meatballs in tomato sauce, and beef in jus.  Dessert is watermelon, and then for aperitif I’m offered coffee or limoncello.  I ask for the limoncello and am given a half-full corked glass bottle from the freezer of the bright yellow liquid, thick and alcoholic, and a shot glass.  It would be all but impossible, especially after a litre of wine, but I could have sat and finished it if I wanted to.  And all this for a flat €25.  AND as I walked out the husband gave me a bottle of wine!