135: Kotor (rain). 2012/9/13

[Perast and more = photos.]

The light wasn’t great for the past few days in Budva and Kotor.  Today, the second day in Kotor, was a totally different business.  Basically the rain started last night at midnight, and it POURED.  (And the mosquitoes also woke me several times.)

The rain just kept pouring all the way until past 10am.  This morning when I first went out for the pastries I found that basically it was a small flood – in some places the water went as high as half of my boots.

The worst thing? Yesterday there was one group that went on the hostel’s “Big Montenegro Tour,” which I really wanted to take advantage of, mainly to see that Ostrog Monastery.  Today of course no-one wants to go.  And the two young ladies in the hostel said that since now “isn’t high season,” they don’t know when there’ll be a next tour.

Darn! I cut short my stay in Budva and in fact the last of the Balkan itinerary because of this very good and good-value tour!

In the hostel was an Australian old man, who was asking the hostel clerk (this time a black short curly haired lady) about a Shenghen zone question.  Basically he was thinking about returning to Greece and didn’t know whether he could combine the latter half of his stay during the first 180-day span with the first part of his stay during the second 180-day span.  Nosy as I could be, I checked for him and told him the answer, although he went on about the topic, continuing to be very indecisive about it: on the one hand he didn’t know whether it’d work, and on the other he kept saying that he “should risk things.”

And in the morning a young man with lovely eyes and wet hair came in.  I asked if he needed to dry his hair, but he said — with all earnestness — that rain water is neutral and good for the hair.  I later started to talk with this brunette, who is from somewhere near Stuttgart and is a medicine quality inspector.  He asked whether I’m still a student, told me that my English has such a clean accent that I could be from the States.  Ah, that Stuttgart accent… it recalled me of someone from long long time ago and emerges rather aphrodisiac.

(And later today came in two young Brits with faces and head-body proportions (but not the bodies) of probably anyone from a certain Lukas film company’s roaster…)

Well, I decided that no matter how big the rain was, I should go out, and that was what I did.  The rain was so big that it went through even my umbrella and my supposedly water-proof booth a bit.  Originally I wanted to go for the bus to Perast, but then I decided to have lunch first.

I found a place with lunch set menus.  I thought I heard from the waiter that the “fish menu” costs 5 Euros, and it was very tasty and plentiful in volume indeed, but the price was actually 12 Euros.  Which was ok, considering that it was done really very well – the calamari was really yummy.

I then went for the bus for Perast, but while there was supposed to be a bus every hour on the first quarter, I waited for more than hour, and the bus never came.  Eventually I went to check with a nice tourist info lady, and she said it was odd.  However, I could go to Main Bus Station and ask for any bus to Herceg Novi, she said, which I did, although on the way to the bus station a driver on a Herceg-Novi-bound bus saw me and was nice enough to let me up – usually bus drivers don’t seem to do this here.  He told me that the fare is 1.5 Euros, although since he could break a 10-Euro bill, (I mean, really! Are you kidding me?) he took 2 instead of 1 Euro.

It stopped raining before I went to check with the tourist info lady, and yet it was still very windy in Perast, which is a really tiny place.  Yeah, it could be atmospheric, but again I think LP’s description of Perast, claiming it to look like “a chunk of Venice flowing up the [Adriatic?] coastline” is more creative writing than exaggeration – frankly, I think the writer should be whipped, if not shot.  Before soon I hopped on a bus back to Kotor.

At least I did something, and the day was less unfruitful than I expected.

At night I saw the German guy in the common area again, and there were two young German girls in their early twenties.  The dark-hair one saw me typing like lightning and asked exactly how I type my language, so I explained to her, and she as well as the others were much enticed by how complicated both my language and the key-in system seem to them.   Later they invited me to play some card game, and it turned out that in the other common area of the hostel there was already a crowd, led by some Brits.  So we played a drinking card game with their i-Pad, and it was hilarious.

9/13記帳：
麵包：4
中餐：13.5
Kotor – Perast公車：2*2
住宿：11.8
總計： 33.3EUR