Second Holiday
‘From the backseat, a family of four showed me the middle finger. I walked on.’
In the third month of our relationship, my girlfriend Masha and I were having dinner, when she said, ‘I only get one holiday per boyfriend.’
I looked at her, confused, my mouth full of pasta and tomato sauce. ‘How come?’
‘Don’t know. Always been like that. One holiday, one Christmas. One year.’
I thought about it. ‘I guess we could take another holiday,’ I said. ‘Time to break the pattern!’
And just like that — cue Sarah Jessica Parker voice — after we’d barely made it back from a family trip to Turkey in one piece, Masha and I booked another flight. This time to Montenegro.
If you’re not from Eastern Europe, you might be wondering. Why go to Montenegro when you can go to, uh, Italy? Somewhere definitely European, somewhere you’ve seen in the movies or on your friends Instagram profiles.
The answer is, in short, visa.
Where I come from, Montenegro is one of those big three holiday destinations — alongside Egypt and Turkey — where you don’t need a visa. And if you say you’re Russian, people give you wide-eyed looks. But not the American wide-eyed, which says ‘If-it-weren’t-for-us-you-would-be-speaking-German!’…
