Kotor, Montenegro Week One: Mountains, Sea, and a Flight of Stairs to School
If you are new here, the short version is this: we are a family of six, Chris and I and our four small boys, currently rotating through the world in three-month stints with a worldschooling program called Boundless Life. We just wrapped a season in Italy and landed in Kotor, Montenegro. The travel day getting here was, in short, an ordeal. But this is not about the travel day. This is about what happened after we dropped our bags and started working out how to live in a town where every car in the country seems to funnel through the same tunnel.
Our commute to school is a flight of stairs
This is our first Boundless cohort where we are in the community housing, and it so happens that the school is on the first floor. Eight families, and we are right above the classrooms, so the commute to school is a flight of stairs. In Italy there was a community building but we were not staying in it, so this is our first time actually living stacked on top of everyone. It turns out that is where you want to be in the Kotor cohort. This is where people gather.
The apartment we braced ourselves for
We ended up with the biggest unit (of the small units!), mostly because a handful of families had told us to ask for this exact apartment. We had braced ourselves for very small. We knew going in it would be tighter than Italy, and technically it is (1100 vs 1800 sq ft). But it is newer and laid out so much better, and the windows and the light make it feel bigger than I had pictured. It has a big balcony too. Our place in Pistoia had high ceilings and all the charm, it was just old and never laid out quite right. This one is open and bright and makes the most of its space. I do miss the character, but the ease of living is also very appreciated.
Strategic child placement
The rooms are shared this time. There was no little office nook to tuck the baby into like we had before, so the baby is in with the four-year-old and three-year-old is in with the six-year-old. Both little ones are in slumber pods so they cannot see their brothers. We tested the pods over the summer and so far they are holding. Putting the baby with the four-year-old was deliberate. He is the deepest sleeper we have ever produced. He would sleep through the building coming down around him. The baby wakes up crying on and off through the night and the four-year-old has yet to notice.
The best sleep of our nomadic lives
I have to hand it to Boundless on the sleep setup, because it is seriously the best we’ve had. Every window has automatic shutters that drop all the way down, the air conditioning actually works, and the rooms get properly dark and cold at night. We had none of that in Italy, where sleep was more of a negotiation. Here everyone is out cold. Chris and I really value sleep, and we can’t sleep in a queen bed or smaller. He’s 6’2″ and takes up a lot of space. Some might think it’s weird but our life hack is to bring one of the extra single beds into our master and combine it with the queen. Looks crazy but we sleep like babies and have room for all four boys to come in and cuddle in the morning. Highly recommend.
We met everyone before we unpacked
The start was fast. In Italy we had three or four days to settle before the welcome brunch. This time we landed the night before, ate, slept, and woke up to meet every family in the cohort while we were still half unpacked. The kids saw their classrooms and met their teachers before I had figured out the coffee situation. It was a lot at once, but since all of it was in our building, at least nobody had to commute to their own orientation.
We are fifty percent of the class
The younger kids class is very small this round. Four kids in the 1.5-3 year old class, down from at least eight in Italy. There are only two other children besides our two, which means our family makes up half of it. I have mixed feelings about that. Two teachers and that much attention is wonderful. It also means the pool of tiny friends is thin. Our four-year-old is in the four to five class and our six-year-old is in the six to eight, after a brief issue where he was almost placed a year younger because he had only just turned six. It was handled quickly, and everyone is happy in their respective classes.
The group
The group is a good one. The usual mix of Canadians and Americans, a family from the UK, a local Montenegrin couple, a family from Israel, and a couple of families whose home base is best described as “international”. At our first Boundless Connections session everyone told their story and why they had ended up here. It is the kind of crowd you are glad to be stuck in a building with and exploring a new country with for a semester.
The easy parts
Life outside of school has been easy in ways Italy was not. There is a rocky beach a two-minute walk from the door, all sharp views and warm water, and since we keep getting told to make the most of the sea while it lasts, we practically are there every other day. Two waterfront parks nearby, one of them big and a couple of blocks away. A mall next door with a grocery store and a gym inside it, which feels a little commercial and inauthentic but extremely convenient. And dinner actually happens at a reasonable hour here. Nothing shuts down midday, restaurants open early, and we ate on the water at 5:30 this past week. In Italy we could not eat at a restaurant until 7:00pm, so we almost never went out. It is a tourist town, so most people speak English, which helps, because Montenegrin makes Italian look like a warm-up.
And then there are the roads
Nobody warned us about these. The drivers are aggressive and there is traffic everywhere. In Italy we had the ZTL, so the kids could walk out the front door into a car-free street and go get bread on their own. None of that here. We are up a small hill, ringed by traffic, and Old Town is packed every day because the cruise ships keep unloading into it. We brought the scooters because we were told they were essential, and I am not sure they were the right call. Four children scootering down cobblestones into a crowd of cruise passengers, with crazy drivers and traffic is an accident waiting to happen. The stroller, meanwhile, has more than earned its keep.
Padel, or: a study in traffic
Padel has been its own saga. We fell in love with the sport in Italy, one of the few things Chris and I can play together as a team. In Italy we biked to the courts. Here the first session was billed as a 20-minute drive and turned into 45 after a court mix-up sent us across to Tivat, then an hour and twenty to get home. Today we drove to Lustica Bay, which was stunning, took 20 minutes to reach, and well over an hour to get back. Everything in Kotor bottlenecks into one road and one tunnel, and that is the whole story of driving here. We did not have a car in Italy and did not miss it. Now we understand why. But there are no trains to hop here, so a car is necessary.
The part that makes up for all of it
The views. Mountains in every direction, dropping straight into the water, the kind of scenery we simply did not have in Tuscany and have not gotten used to yet. Chris is in love.
So week one was nothing like Italy. The baby refuses to nap at school, the traffic remains undefeated, and Old Town still belongs to the cruise ships. But the kids love school, the people are the kind you want to be stuck in a building with, and every morning we open the shutters to mountains falling into the sea. Chris gets his skipper license in a few weeks, and by the time tourist season winds down we should know this place a whole lot better. For now the traffic can keep the roads. We will be on the balcony, looking at the mountains.
