The Short Walk Home
Monday 12/07/2009 3:30 PM
So I thought I'd do a post with sites around our neighborhood as I see them on my walk to and from school. The school is only a few blocks from our apartment, so unless it's really raining hard, I walk there and back. Last week I took some pictures of the walk home. The first ones were of the building where I teach, but it was already too dark at 4:30 for any of them to turn out well, so I'll have to include them in a later post. For now, we'll start at the newest bridge in Podgorica, the Millennium Bridge, which crosses the Moraca River right across the street from the Faculty of Economics, which houses the Institute of Foreign Languages, which is where I'm teaching.
On this afternoon, I walked away from the bridge on 18 Jula Blvd. for a couple of blocks until I got to Svetozara Markovica, which turns into Ivana Vujosevica (our street) a couple of blocks later. I should let you know that I actually have to look at my city map to get these street names because there aren't many street signs at all in Podgorica and I've never actually known the names of any of these roads (except, of course Ivana Vujosevica). It might help to tell you that all of these routes form a square with the school in the northeast corner and our apartment in the southwest corner: 18 Jula marks the northern edge of the square, Svetozara Markovica/Ivana Vujosevica marks the western edge, Bulevar Sv. Petra Cetinjskog is the southern edge, and Ivana Multinovica/Jovana Tomasevica is the eastern edge and runs along the Moraca River.
So here we are on Svetozara Markovica, looking toward where it turns into Ivana Vujosevica, otherwise known as our street:
Here we pass a grocery store, several cafes, and the ever-popular Kruna and Mimi fast food stands:
The other route leads us away from Ivana Vujosevica along Bulevar Sv. Petra Cetinjskog, which we take to Ivana Multinovica/Jovana Tomasevica (you see why I've never bothered with streetnames?), the road which runs along the Moraca River. Bulevar Sv. Petra Cetinjskog is the first major crossroad we come to when we leave our apartment, and it leads us to a couple of our favorite cafes and later to the town center. When we were out today, I took this picture of the sidewalk along it from IM/JT, looking toward the intersection with our street:
And I forced Alex to pose outside of two of our favorite neighborhood cafes, Masa (Mah-shah -- what looks like a W on the sign is the cyrillic symbol for the sh sound) and Art Cafe -- though I feel a little guilty naming them as our favorites without including Maestro Pizza, but I don't have a photo of Maestro right now. I'll get one in the next few days.
And here is a bank of kiosks on the corner of this street and our street: veggies, grill stand, and newspapers:
Maybe this is where I should also include the death notices, Montenegro's version of the obit page in the paper, which I thought might be wanted posters when we first arrived. Luckily, my friend Chris clued me in:
And here we are at the front door of our building:
And the lift, which is pretty old and pretty small but works, though I've had a hard time convincing Alex of that since he got stuck in it back in September. The first time he went to the store by himself, he took the lift to get back up to our fourth-floor apartment, but while he was in it, some impatient person managed to open the exterior lift door on the first floor, making it stop between floors.
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There isn't an emergency call button in it, so he had to bang on the door and holler for someone to come help him. He was pretty freaked out, and rightfully so. Right about the time I started thinking that he ought to be home, one of the neighbors knocked on our door to tell me that my son was stuck in the lift. Several people were in the hall on the levels below our floor, looking over the railing at the commotion on the floor below ours. I ran downstairs and there was a very nice man talking to him through the door, and by the time I got there, the lift started moving again. They'd just figured out why the lift had stopped and someone had run down to close the ground floor door again. Alex was pretty terrified when he got out of the lift but put on a tough face until we got back in the apartment. He hasn't used it since then and won't let me use it either, which is good for the leg muscles, if nothing else.
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