Kotor, Montenegro (Crna Gora)
Montenegro means “black mountain” in Italian and the local name for the country is Crno Gora, which also means “black mountain”. So I traveled by bus from Dubrovnik through Herceg Novi to the old walled city of Kotor in Montegro. Kotor is at the end of a deep fjord. (And I thought fjords were only in Scandinavia.)
The must have been a lot of danger of invasion back in the middle ages because every city has a wall around it. Kotor has the most incredible wall you will find anywhere–it goes up the side of a mountain!
I stayed in a bedroom in a woman’s apartment right in the center of the walled city. The lady was quite interesting. She was highly educated, well read and she spoke five languages–English, French, Russian, Greek, and of course Crnogorski which is the local slavic language. Crnogorski is really almost the same as Serbian which is almost the same as Croation. In the evenings she would come home from work (she was an economist) and we would talk. I really learned a lot from her about her country and what it was like during the communist days.