Postscript

So I promised I would add a few thoughts on my trip to Montenegro. It was a pretty interesting experience, because it was similar in a lot of ways to other Mediterranean countries I've visited, and yet fundamentally different from anywhere I've ever been before. I chalk most of those differences up to communism and the war.

The hotel we stayed in, and where our meetings were held, was actually not a hotel at all but a Tito-era medical facility. In a town of beautiful little bed and breakfasts, my colleagues somehow thought it was a good idea to hole us up in a cinder block institution in desperate need of a pressure wash. The staff were surly, there was no TV and no internet, and the food was just what you'd expect to find in a communist hospital. It was incredibly frustrating; here I was in a beautiful seaside resort town, forced to spend nearly every waking hour cloistered in the most hideous building in all of Montenegro.

Little hints of the Tito era were everywhere. Just when you thought you could safely close your eyes and imagine yourself in any other Mediterranean country, something distinctly central/eastern Europe would pop up. For example, the lovely little open air cafes and bars along the seaside look exactly like their cousins in Italy, Greece or Turkey. But in Herzeg Novi these bars have a distinctly Montenegrian musical attraction, consisting of a hairy man in black acid wash jeans, a wife beater and wearing a chunky gold chain standing over a 1980s keyboard and belting out Serbian pop songs with a heavy vibrato.

Hints of the war are everywhere too. I took these pictures in Dubrovnik, a famous site in Croatia just across the border from where we were. As you can see from the picture of the sign, the war is still fresh in their minds, and they obviously aren't going out of their way to pursue reconciliation with their Serbian and Montenegrian neighbours. I was struck by how this sign -- at a major international tourist destination -- not only lays clear blame for the destruction visited upon the town, but does so in decidedly ethnic terms. It was not Serbia that attacked Croatia, according to this sign, but Serbs. I find that pretty disturbing. (Click on the photo for a larger image.)

Still, I can't imagine how difficult it would be to get over something like that. One of the reasons Dubrovnik is so photogenic these days is because of the beautiful terra cotta roofs, which are so fresh and bright looking because they're new. The old ones were virtually all bombed out, as you can see from the dots on the sign (which mark where bombs fell on the town). The last picture shows the contrast between the old roofs and the new. Pretty stark.

Anyway, those are my impressions, such as I was able to form in the fleeting hours when I was outside the Tito institution. The most lasting impression of all was that I definitely want to go back.