Montenegro - #88HT

Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. After being away from capitals for while, the last one that I stopped was Zagreb, here I was in another one again. The detail is that Podgorica in fact wasn't fitting in the stereotype of a European capital. Actually it became a capital just in 2006 when Montenegro was declared an independent state. The territory is part of former Yugoslavia and Serbia and Montenegro. Today even being a historical region, Montenegro is doing its first steps as an independent country with its 620 thousand inhabitants.

We just arrived in the central station and our idea about final destination would be Budva, but we didn't want to pay for another bus and decided to travel by hitchhiking in the day after. Well, once we just had 2 days to travel, the Albanian dream was postponed. My original plan was spending one night in Budva and another night somewhere in Albania close from the Montenegrin border. This was just a plan. We were completely opened to change it anytime. No pressures, why not to stop in Podgorica for one night? City that not a lot of people recommended me to go, saying that there is not a lot of things to see there. Anyway, I understand why they say that. I kind of agree with them, Podgorica is not really the European capital full of attractions. Do not expect to find a small Paris over there. At the same time, if you know me enough reading me, I'm not searching for attractions while I'm traveling. In fact I'm trying to avoid big tourist cities. My impression about Podgorica? Not tourist at all, but you'll know more about that later. 

In this moment we were trying to find a Couchsurfing's host for this night, waiting for answers and sending new requests. Quickly we just realized that it wouldn't work easily, once we didn't have Wi-Fi during the trip, these minutes with WIFI were helping us to figure out where to sleep.

Airbnb? Not really. A lot of rooms weren't available for this night and the ones that were available the owners didn't reply us on time. We needed to search then for a hostel, it also happened when I stayed in Zadar, at the same time Zadar was a smaller and tourist city, where a lot of hostels were available. In Podgorica, we were knocking in different hostels and we had the same answer: We have no vacancies!

It's crazy, the main hostels in the city center were all booked. Well, everything is about lucky, there were big school excursion and these groups of students booked up the hostels.

After walking one hour we found a guesthouse that the only place available to sleep cost 25 euros for both of us.

I'm not the complaining person, I would say that I'm easy going, but this night I wasn't really satisfied with the sleeping place. The price was really too much for the Montenegrin average of price for the room that we've got. A small room with a double bed that there was almost no space to walk inside the room. There were no windows in the room, just a small fanlight in wall. The blankets weren't clean and the shower was weird, outside of the room. Anyway after a shower we just decide to forget about our place of staying and we went out to check what was going on in Podgorica at night.