Budva – The International Council of Barristers

Budva Beachfront at Night

We had stopped in Budva for about an hour to change buses on our way from Kotor to Sveti Stefan and neither of us were impressed.  The city around the bus station was very much Miami meets Jersey Shore.  It was dingy, trashy, sprawled, and just plain ugly.  Neither of us were particularly excited about returning to Budva, but it is the largest tourist destination in the country and it offered a convenient hub from which we hoped to take a day-trip and visit the Ostrog Monastery.

Sometimes first impressions aren’t accurate.  We definitely found that to be the case with Budva.  Our bus dropped us off right at the gates to the old town—Budva is our last fortified coastal town.   The old town and the main promenade are like two completely different cities.  The old town is essentially a smaller Dubrovnik.  All of the streets are cobblestoned and the entire town is just a collection of narrow alley-like streets weaving between the uniformly stone buildings.  However, unlike Kotor the town was a lot livelier and the food was much better.

It was in Budva that we met the next great Montenegrin character in our trip: Gordana.  As Ghorgie would later describe her, “Gordana is a bus…and then she is a bus.”  That description could not be more accurate.  She owned the hostel that we were staying at, but wasn’t there when we arrived.  Instead, her sister took our passports and gave us a key but couldn’t help us further, insisting that we wait for Gordana, who she was sure would show up within an hour (by 2:00 pm).  We were waiting outside the front door of the hostel when we first met her.  A very large—both in height and girth—came careening down the alley toward us, not even stopping to say hello or ask what we needed, but only saying, “You need help with hostel, follow me,” and beckoning us into the door.

As we later found out Gordana is originally from Bosnia.  She was vacationing in Montenegro in the early 90’s when the bombing started in her hometown, part of the current Republika Srpska—the Serbian section of the country.  She figured it would be over in a few days, but quickly realized she had been completely displaced.  A few years later, while still “temporarily” in Montenegro, NATO and the US began bombing Montenegro.  Gordana was running an old hostel at the time and said she was sure she’d have to go back to Bosnia because tourism in Montenegro would surely be destroyed by the bombings.  Yet, to her surprise, the day after the bombing her hostel was completely booked.  She said it was then that she decided to permanently stay here and create what has become an empire.  She now owns three hostels in Budva, Kotor, and Podgorica (the capital) as well as a dress boutique with shops in Budva and Kotor.  What’s more, she has created a number of excursion tours from those cities to other places in the area.  In a very coincidental discovery, we learned that she has recently become the very first Montenegrin to export anything to the United States, and of all places she exported 20 of her dresses to North Carolina!

We had a very relaxing afternoon on the beach in Budva followed by a cheap Chinese dinner.  Yes, we had Chinese in Europe.  You can only have the same heavy sausage and chicken dishes for so long before you’re yearning for something a little different.  It was fantastic.

What was supposed to be a relaxing evening to catch up on miscellaneous things turned out to be the complete opposite—but still a lot of fun.  The thing about backpacking through Europe is that when you meet other people in the hostels, it’s a very hit-or-miss experience.  Yet sometimes things click and you happen to be in the right place at the right time.  In those situations, you tend to become very close with new friends, very quickly.  Last night was one of those times. 

We shared a hostel room with six other people, four of which we became quite good friends with.  There were three Aussies and an Indian girl from England.  Amy, one of the Aussies, was a deceptive 26, tall, and extremely outgoing.  From what I can gather she worked as a freelance photographer but really just traveled around and did whatever she wanted.  Mick, another Aussie, was a built six-foot “chippy” (carpenter), which Amy assured us explained why he had great taste in music.  The last of the Aussies, Warren, was a 26-year-old “retired” IT technician.  I’m still not sure how you can be retired at 26, but he essentially works whenever he wants—around 4-5 months a year he says—and travels around the world for the rest of the year.  Sukanya, the English Indian, was slightly younger than me and studying to be a lawyer in London.

After going to the store to get a few beers and a bottle of Montenegrin dessert wine, we were quickly sucked into playing cards with the four of them (None of which previously knew each other).  We swapped stories and card games.  Amy broke out her Venetian deck of cards—Italian cards are regional and have different suits, face cards, and fewer cards generally—and taught us how to play Scopa.  Afterwards, I taught them all how to play my Italian card game: Scala 40 (Ladder 40), essentially a variation on Rummy.

When the girls in the two remaining beds went to sleep, we moved our party upstairs to the common room.  That’s where the night started to degrade.  Not long after we moved up there two very drunk lawyers from Uruguay showed up to join us.  They loved me, both because I was a lawyer and because I had no qualms about talking South American soccer “smack” with them.  While we got along well, they were far too drunk and loud for the groove we’d all fallen into for the night.  Not long after they joined us, the larger of the two got far too drunk and some tiny French girl materialized to help him get down the stairs to his bed.  Around 2:00 am Kati and I called it quits because we had to wake up early and tour the rest of the country.