Hmmmm….something is not right here, this country is a little bit of an enigma. Montenegro seems to operate under a cloak of secrecy and invisibility…..I mean really, had you even heard of the country, let alone knew where it was before?
Rosie is trying to piece together the mystery that surrounds this town and all she keeps coming up with is more questions and no answers. For fear of asking too many questions to the wrong people and ending up in a Russian Gulag….(forced labor camp in the middle of Siberia.)….Rosie too will have to fly under the radar. At this point, please fashion a hat out of tinfoil and place it on your head for the rest of this missive.
Lets start at the beginning, when one enters Montenegro…your passport is scanned at the border and you are registered as entering the country. You are counted and logged as an official outsider being allowed inside.
As soon as you cross the invisible line and set foot in this country, the hills and the dark woods enclose you and your online google maps goes haywire and stops transmitting. This was all working perfectly in the rest of Europe and right up to the border entry. Then bam….nothing. How can a satellite and cell network have such a clean cut off point? How is that possible?
Switching to offline map navigation we found this loosely works in this country. It too seems a tad shadey and does not want to reveal the exact pinpoint location of anything but gives you your destination accurate to within a 50 meter radius.
There are no street names on the map for the town of Kotor that Rosie is staying in, Rosie just thought it was the dodgy mapping….our apartment never gave us an address to find the place…serious, we searched for the name of the apartment and were given the 50 metre radius where we then had to search for it by foot. There are no street signs anywhere….I mean anywhere in the whole town. In our apartment building there are 6 flats and no mailboxes…
Taxis roam freely in this town, it is not a small town…where do you tell a taxi to deliver you too? Rosie needs to organise a taxi to take her to the airport, she was going to book it online but had no address for the booking form. She asked her land lord for the address, he arranged the taxi for me. Rosie is still non the wiser.
When we reached our destination our passport was lodged with the authorities and our temporary address is on record with the amount of days we will be staying….all noted for easy access if the authorities need to bust down your door in the middle of the night, for transportation to said gulag.
We immediately connected back onto the worldwide web with a local SIM as no other European ones would work here in this odd enclave. The strange thing is, that for a country with a total population of 650,000 Montenegro has the highest amount of cell users per capita in Europe….every man woman and child in this country has 1.5 cellphones, all with active accounts. These are questions that need answering….is this a country of players, with everyone having a secret lover on standby? Why the undercover covertness of an extra phone?
Rosie also does not hear any TV through the thin walls of her apartment. She hears children and talking and yelling…but no TV noise from anywhere….looking around there are no satellite dishes on any roofs and there doesn’t seem to be any cabling (which would need to be retrofitted in the Old Town) on the exterior of houses. Curious and curiouser.
Montenegro also has its own language…really? You wouldn’t think so. Every country in the world has an language app available to help you converse locally…not Montenegro. Google translate has a dude speaking the worlds and they are indecipherable. Rosie was worried that this is what the language really sounds like…there is no way she can understand the Google dude to copy it. Maybe The Operator would have better luck, it kind of sounds like him talking English after downing a few to many local Palenkovic. But no, even he said it was beyond him….listening to the locals converse on the street, its not that bad. Rosie would have loved to give it a go, but alas, this country has also blocked access to its language to foreigners. Surely Rosie like in Croatia mostly everyone can speak English? Yeah nah….Rosie knows they can more than they do….and Rosies smile does not break through the iron curtain of race relations here either.
Finally…everyone walks around here holding A4 folders. Serious, plastic see through ones, of which they are full of…papers. Slightly fancier opaque plastic ones to obscure said papers abit more and a couple actually have fancy fold over leather ones. All clutch these folder to their chests as they bustle about as if they are just off to a job interview or about to conduct an important business presentation of some sort…. Odd.
When Rosie comes to broach these questions to the people she has become acquainted with, suddenly their normally adequate English is not able to translate or, they look at their watches and indicate prior meetings or bustle to clean tables that suddenly need re cleaning.
Is it a country wide conspiracy of something? Even though Big Brother doesn’t seen to be watching this off the grid country…is he really? Or, has Montenegro just been held back abit from the rest of the world and is just catching up….The questions rage on unanswered.
