Foodie Asshole: Our Hostel in Kotor, Montenegro

Previously: Virpazar and Skadar

When we got to our unpronounceable hostel (Hostel Kaludjerovic), the owner immediately brought us a big plate of (flavorless) bread, prsut (smoke-dried ham), and sir (cheese).

I found both inedibly pungent, fatty and salty. Later, my friend Cortney went to Kotor and brought back really good, smokey prsut and cheese from the Saturday outdoor market in Old Town, Kotor, so if you can, try the local foods from there instead of from your hostel owner.

Right next door to our hostel was this bakery, Pekara As.

Huge chocolate loaves - .8 euros each - Not great, but tasty. Much better if you fry up some bacon and stick it inside.

One fruit pastry plus three cheese rolls, which I was dismayed to discover weren't actually filled with cheese but just drizzled in an overly-pungent cheese much like the nauseating stuff from our hostel, Total cost = .50 euros

A fucking kolache! - .8 euros - If only they had one with cheese (not to mention jalapenos!), but just hot dog was so good too, and the flaky pastry wasn't half bad itself.

The night before we left Kotor, we drunkenly came in around midnight to try to buy wine, cigarettes and toilet paper since the Maxi down the street was closed. Three men who were flirting with us women folk gave us all cigarettes and wouldn't let Robert pay for them. One of them said he'd been living for the past two years on Martha's Vineyard.

The lady working there sold us a bottle of wine for $5 euro but didn't seem to like us there and didn't offer glasses. Another man in an orange work suit who was at a table with two women eating and drinking like this was a restaurant instead of a bakery came up and tried to talk to us. But his English and his accent were such that we weren't sure whether he was offering to buy us a bottle of wine and/or he wanted us out because we were ruining his fancy date.

We left and sang Moulin Rouge songs on the driveway of our hostel until the owner kicked us nicely off it. We went ahead and paid for the hostel right then so we wouldn't have to deal with it in the morning, then we went back to the water to drink and smoke more. Ten or fifteen minutes later, we saw the hostel owner walking along the road with a woman. I wondered if he paid for out of our payment.

When I wind up on a trip with a number of people I just met, which happens to me more often than you'd think, often, sometime around day three, one of them will suddenly put his arm around my shoulders and say, "Arielle, I'm really glad you came with us. I mean, sincerely," and then the others chime in and agree. Of course, wine helps with that.

One night, we found out we could order Chinese food and have it delivered to our hostel.