Festival organizer Elena Khmelevskaya galloped through the Balkans

Montenegro (Kotor, Tivat), Bosnia and Herzegovina (Mostar, Pochitel, Sarajevo) opened to our countrywoman from the best side. Why stay home? Elena shared her impressions with “MK in Karelia” so that she wanted suitcases:

To scold one-day cruise tourists in Kotor for coming from the sea like a tide and leaving, leaving behind only empty glasses and the feeling that the city was rented out for a few hours and then returned to the owners.

Learn to choose ripe mandarins on a tree. It's important. Ripe tangerine smells like sun. It's heavy. Don't push him.

Find yourself in the Dinaric Alps: not because the road led there, but because the road did not lead anywhere, and the mountains just ended up where you were, and you stood and they stood.

Waiting for Giovana from the local supermarket to finish her business and sell you water. In this expectation, at the shelf with cookies, suddenly realize that time here flows not by hours, but by mood, and that someone else’s slowness is also a form of hospitality, only unusual for those who are used to paying for speed.

To be crushed that I never tasted a fig tree because I had eaten too much Balkan cuisine before. You eat chevapi and pleskavitsa to the state of “I never again”, and then it turns out that the main dish of Herzegovina is a fig, thick fig dessert, you never tried.

Feed on historical significance at the beginning of World War I: stand on the corner where it all began. Feel that the story does not consist of paragraphs of a smooth and accurate paragraph with dates in parentheses, it seeps out of the pavement of Sarajevo.

To love the South Slavic "praise" is more than "thank you" because "thank you" sounds like habit and politeness, and "praise" is pronounced as if it really means something.