Croatia Full of Life. How come we didn't go to Astoria

 

 

The plan was to sleep well last night and long in the morning. The plan didn't work out. It was probably the hard bed for me and the room being too hot for Scott. How it was so hot on his side, while on my side I pulled the blanket up to my nose, probably remains an unsolved mystery.

The first thing in the morning we started our way to Montenegro - a 15 minutes drive on the narrow mountain road, and two border crossings later we were there. At the first resort town on the way, we drove up the hill to enjoy the beautiful views and see Tivat, which was only about 15 km away from us as the crow flies, but about an hour and a quarter to reach it by car.

With Google Maps in hand, we made our way through the city and still managed to miss one left turn, because we just didn't recognise the narrow footpath as a street. We then took the next one left and moved along the narrow and winding streets practically vertically back to where we originally needed to go.

Our plan was to go to Red Lobster for lunch, but when we got there it turned out that this bistro was closed without a single word of explanation. Being starving, we just went to the next restaurant on the same street, which offered a wide variety of burgers and a couple of traditional meat dishes. Scott chose a cheese and ham stuffed burger and I took fried meat with cheese filling. A giant burger patty with fries, a bit of tomato and a huge pile of raw onions was placed in front of Scott. I got something that resembled a Kiev cutlet, but the size would have been suitable for feeding a smaller African village. When I cut through the crispy breading, the liquid, delicious cheese filling flowed out from inside the tender chicken meat. Apparently all the cheese had been put into my meat roll, because there was no sign of ham or cheese on Scott's patty. When the waiter came to ask if everything was alright, the following conversation happened at the table:
Scott: It's all good, but I ordered a ham and cheese filled burger
Waiter: But we don't have that at all, see, here in Montenegrin it says tomato and onion only
Scott: In English it says stuffed burger with cheese and ham
Waiter: I'll see, but they don't know English here, probably translated incorrectly
And that's where it was left, because the next time we saw the waiter, he already came to take the payment. While counting the return, he asked if we would like to add something for his service. We didn't really.

We drove to Kotor and carried our things to the apartment. As well prepared tourists, we had chosen a place for dinner and walked into town to book a table in Astoria for the evening. We also walked around the city a little more, went to a couple of grocery stores and bought some food for tomorrow's hike, and came back to the apartment. This time, our apartment is 10 minutes' walk from the city center on the hillside and the balcony offers absolutely wonderful views of the Bay of Kotor. The street to here is lined with pomegranate trees.

We sat on the balcony and watched the gray clouds gather over the bay. We quickly got dressed so that we could hurry to Astoria before the heavy rain (because I couldn't find a taxi service). We stood on the balcony and looked at this visually so amazing weather and thought about the cheeses and hams we have in the fridge and put on our home clothes again, served dinner on our balcony and stayed in to watch the spectacle created by the thunder.