Flying with Ryan again
The weather changed today. It got cloudy and drizzly with cooler weather; still bearable without a second layer. Kim left about 0700 by metro and train for Brussels’ Zaventem airport bound for Dublin and Chicago.
As for me, I’m heading back to the Balkans. I really enjoyed Bosnia Y Herzegovina last year I decided to return to the region. I like the weather, food, atmosphere and the value-for-money.
I left before 0900 for Charleroi Airport by metro and bus via Midi/Zuid station where I had some breakfast. The bus journey (once I had navigated the large station to the exact stop on the road) took about 35 minutes only as opposed to the hour I had expected or the 90 minutes I had allowed for due to warning about traffic congestion. Hence I arrived some 2h45 before my flight.
I was one of the first at the bagdrop for my Ryanair flight to Podgorica, Montenegro. The queues for their other flights were long. Security was slow and crowded. I don’t know how they would have coped in the old terminal across the runway. The airport is used primarily by Ryanair with a few other flights by other budget airlines.
This is my second time flying with Ryan. I checked my ticket several times to make sure that I had complied with every minor detail; eg. the fee for not printing your own boarding pass at home used to be a hefty EUR80, I recall.
At the boarding gate, I learnt that the pronunciation for my destination is Pod-go-rit-sa. I suppose it makes sense, much like “street” is written as “ulica” and pronounced as “u-lit-sa” in the parts of the Balkan I’ve visited.
The 2h30 flight from Brussels descended past Dubrovnik into Podgorica. The final turn was over lake Skodra which had a milky turquoise tinge to it. The hostel sent me a taxi whose driver was waiting outside arrivals.
Arriving in Podgorica
I rested briefly at my clean but simple accommodation before walking into town and grabbing a dinner by the clock tower which had no clock; it was more of a bell tower perhaps [Edit: I realised years later that it has a clock only on one side, perhaps the side I didn’t see]. Dinner was a satisfying bean-and-sausage stew with bread and salad, followed by a baklava (only because they had run out of cherry pie).
It was a nice change to have pleasant tasting tap water again after Belgium and the parts of the UK I had been in.
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- Clock tower near where I ate.
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- My dinner.
The written language in Montenegro
The language here is largely the same as in Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia. The first two countries use the Latin script while Serbia uses Cyrillic. I gathered Croatia it is Latin because they’re Catholic and with Serbia because they’re Orthodox. But with Montenegro being Orthodox, I was surprised they write in Latin script.
I googled it and found that in 2009, the Latin script replaced the Serbian-style Cyrillic and Croatian-style Latin forms. The Montenegrin Latin form is slightly different from the Croatian.