EU gives aid to Montenegro proportionally to its size, which is 6% of what SMG get. USAID gave $40M to Montenegro - of $90M that they gave to SMG altogether.

Montenegro is an incredibly politicized society. They embraced democracy with an uncanny zeal. The names of opposing political parties, as well as derogatory slogans, are practically everywhere, including the faces of traffic signs.

It seems that other problems are sidelined until the question of independency is solved. And, although there is a feeling of an unfinished job, as long as Serbia and Montenegro are together, and that establishing borders and then opening them up seems to be the most agreeable solution, that does not look as the most pressing issue at the moment in the country in which 1/3 of population is out of work and the rest receives around $200 a month.

The economic catastrophe is heightened by the Montenegrin use of Euro - yup, they are not in EU, but Euro is their currency, driving prices to the EU levels. Gas is 3 times as expensive as in the US. And they wanted to rent me a car in Podgorica for 60 Euro daily.

Fantastically - the seven days trip to Greece from Podgorica costs less at 400 Euros. Yet, of course, the poverty is not everywhere - this is early capitalism, and there are people that are insanely more rich than their neighbors, often from dubitable sources.

That’s how I got a car for 30 Euros a day: the rent-a-car franchise operator simply rented me his wife’s car. And speeding tickets are cheaper than in the US (15 Euros) - of course you pay them on spot. And they make a good money, since in Montenegro my driving is considered mellow. The roads are in utter disrepair and given one of the most punishing geography they are not for faint-hearted (plus there is bunch of flowers on the side of the road marking accident spots every couple of kilometers).

Besides rampant poverty, and widening the gap between rich and poor, there are other problems more pressing than independence. One of them is garbage. Litter is everywhere. People simply need to get in the habit of picking up their non-bio-degradable plastic bottles and carrying them away. Maybe there can be some ideas on what to do with them - but certainly beaches are not the right place for those to be left there.

The other is drought and the derivative problems of water shortages, power capacity drop, and forest fires. EU commissioner Romano Prodi just announced creation of an European emergency response body for sych situations. This year Europe experiences an unseen heat wave - kind of what the US had the last summer: and forests around Mediterranean are burning.

In Montenegro they burn almost unopposed. I literally drove through a forest fire yesterday, which reached the highway, and firemen were nowhere near. Fire probably started near the road - by somebody throwing a cigarette butt out threw the car window. Here, everybody smokes and nobody cares to use an ashtray. They don’t live long enough to catch the lung cancer, anyway. The fire around Tivat that reached the town was put of with the help of the Army and air support from the neighboring Croatia.

A combination of those two problems is one of the worst cases of neglect of citizens welfare I’ve seen in Europe so far. Podgorica is a city of useless bridges - over rivers that do not flow anymore due to the drought. Some of those bridges are intentionally blocked for car traffic - but since riverbed is dry, people drive through the "river" near a restaurant that built the terrace overlooking the river (perhaps in slightly wetter days).

More interesting is that they also let their sewage empty into the dry river bed. Walking through it I stumbled over the large smelly puddle surrounded by the illegally built housing, and I found the source pipe. Disconcertingly, that is not sewage from those houses, but from the army barracks. Ok, army is very big in Podgorica, given the closeness of Albanian border, large refugee camps on the South-East end of the city, and generally high crime rate, but that’s not an excuse for creating a health hazard in the city.

Otherwise there are interesting anecdotal developments - like Podgorica is full of graffiti crosses with 4 S’s - a traditional symbol pf Serb nationalism, yet a wedding car column proceeds smoothly with the Albanian flag perced highly on the forerunning car. In the middle of the city there is a concrete post built under the bridge for jumping in the unbelievably cold river Moraca (which is described as cold in many poems). The post is so high that in the US the insurance companies would build double row of electrified barbed wire around it. Here anybody with balls can do it (and die, of course, if he doesn’t do it right). And being ballsy seems to be of high importance to young Montenegrin males (judging by their driving).

Underneath the problems accumulated through 15 years of wars and bad government there is stunning natural beauty of deep canyons and steep high mountains that pack the Europe’s driest and the Europe’s wettest spot in the very small space. The temperature difference between Podgorica and barely 100 miles afar National Park Durmitor is 30-40 degrees. Ski Resort at Zabljak provides in-bounds extreme terrain on pair with French Alps, and canyons of Tara (the second deepest in the world), Piva, Moraca, Zeta, Lim,... cover much of the glacier melting created geography. Interestingly, Montenegrin mountains are largely undiscovered by tourists, who are baking at the coast.

This pages are under constructions, pictures from the trip will be added soon