Life in emigration

January 2022. Me and covid are sitting at home, waiting to start a new job. Or rather, until covid leaves and I go to work. I had to work from the office, so my departure was delayed for a couple of weeks. When I was ready, HR unwittingly said, among other instructions and explanations, that they were organizing a relocation of employees abroad for a couple of months and asked me how I felt about this offer. We didn’t think for long. Despite the fact that I did not know and had never met either the team or the management of the company I was going abroad with, we agreed to go. There was nothing keeping us in Kyiv. Except for the aquarium fish. But I asked my brother to watch them. We had 10 days to pack. On the weekend, we went to my parents’ house, packed a suitcase for two of us, and headed to Montenegro. As it seemed to everyone at the time, for several months…

Montenegro greeted us with sun and mountains. After the gray Kyiv, this contrast was immediately noticeable. We were going to live in Budva. The transfer to the city was full of first sincere impressions of the incredible nature. At the airport, we could walk around in T-shirts, there was snow on the passes, and when we saw the view of the sea and Budva, everyone just gasped. Upon arrival and settlement, my wife and I simply threw all our stuff into the apartment and walked towards the sea. It was our first trip in a long time. We went to the store, bought some sausages and a roll, sat down on the beach and just chewed on this simple lunch with a beautiful view in front of us.

At that time, many IT people practiced the so-called “workation”, where you seem to be abroad in a tourist destination, but you also work full time. It was the first time I had such an experience, and I liked it. It took half a minute to walk to the improvised “office”, and you have time in the morning until 10 and in the evening after 7 to explore the new location and get to know the local life and people. And weekends, of course. They often planned some kind of activity with trips to the local beauty spots and neighboring villages. Many of us enjoyed it, but some got bored after a month and planned to return to Ukraine. Two things were holding them back: the release was coming soon and it would be desirable to keep the team together during this time, and rumors began to circulate that the crazed leader of the neighboring state was waiting for the end of the Olympics in China to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The rumors were not empty, as the horde of orcs in the training near our borders proved.

February 24. This date is engraved in the minds of every Ukrainian. Everyone remembers this day. It started differently for each of us, but for everybody it was the same feeling of fear, panic, hate, and rage. We were abroad when it happened. We did not see these horrors, we did not hear the sirens and explosions, we did not evacuate under fire. For us, this day passed in kilometer-long news feeds in the telegram and endless calls to our relatives asking them to move to a safe place and take care of themselves. I have been struggling for a long time, and I am still struggling, with the feeling of a traitor. I’m abroad when my country is fighting for its freedom and independence. I have to come back, take up arms, and die young. These feelings fought with rationality. Rationality won. We stayed in Montenegro. Everyone will judge whether the choice was right in their own way. Ours was like this. From that moment on, life in emigration began.

Our team was taken out of Ukraine in case of a full-scale war. So that we could release the product we had been working on for the past few years. But few people believed in the reality of this scenario and almost no one was ready. The beginning of the war came as a shock. When everyone realized that this was not a nightmare but a new reality, we started to come up with a plan of action. We stopped traveling around the country, started negotiating long-term leases, began rebuilding our lives from tourist to expat mode, and donations to various foundations and the Armed Forces became a regular necessity. The lease was for a year. These were the conditions for an adequate price in a tourist town, including the high season months. At the time, many people thought that this was an unrealistically long time and that we would not stay here for that long. Who knew, who knew…

When you find yourself in a foreign country for a long time without the possibility of returning to your usual life, your brain needs to catch on to something familiar and understandable. In our case, this familiarity was our team. We united and created our own little community in an unfamiliar world. Work also helped. It gave us a chance to switch from the endless viewing of the news feed. Little by little, everyone started to get used to the new country: looking at different stores and prices, finding good deals, building a regimen, and the first routines began to appear. Routines are the brain’s desire for stability and predictability, in a sense, to reduce the stress of everyday small choices. When you have a job, your daily routine is quite simple: some free time in the morning, then to work, then some free time in the evening. Over time, a routine was built.

As soon as some kind of regime was formed, my wife and I began to explore local life and tried to understand what Montenegro is like, how people live here, what they do and eat, how they rest and work, whether they see the beauty in which they live. In short, Montenegro is a country of incredible beauty. Two wonderful natural components have come together here - the sea and the mountains. And they combined in such a way that I have never seen a more beautiful place before. High rocky mountains bump into the clear blue sea, forming crystal-clear pebble beaches and stone shores. No matter which way you turn, there is a view to take a photo. My first impressions of nature were simply wow. A year later, they haven’t changed much. People. To better understand the people here, we need to go a little deeper into history. Montenegro became an independent state only in 2006, and a slightly more than 50 percent of the population voted in the referendum to separate from Serbia. For example, in the 1991 Ukrainian referendum, more than 90 percent voted in favor. This context and the small size of the country make it clear that the country is heavily dependent on its neighbors and is a satellite of Serbia. The Serbs, with their imperialist tendencies, sometimes consider Montenegrin lands almost their own, and the border is rather arbitrary for them. They move freely around the country, and during the season it seems that there are more Serbian cars in the city than local ones. We have seen this story somewhere before. The only difference here is that Montenegro has joined NATO and is under the protectorate of the alliance. This does not prevent them from trading with the Balkan countries, but it does insure them from possible annexations. Life in tourist cities depends entirely on the season. They don’t divide the year into 4 seasons, they have only two - season and off-season. During the season, everyone is hustling and busy, renting out their homes, offering post-holiday services, selling what they can. In some 3-4 months, they need to make enough money for the rest of the year to wait for the next season and start all over again. But if the season was successful, in the fall and winter, everyone just hibernates, goes about their daily business, drinks kaffa in cafes, and enjoys life. In general, Montenegrins can hardly be called workaholics. They even have ten rules, you can Google them if you’re interested, but they all mean the same thing: “if you can not to work, don’t work,” and the main word in the Montenegrin vocabulary is polako, which means “slowly.” That’s how they live - polako-polako.

It is very interesting to observe a tourist city throughout the year. It changes dramatically. In winter, most of the waterfront establishments are closed, I would even say boarded up, literally. The promenade is empty, there are no deck chairs or umbrellas on the beach. The waiters in the cafes are relaxed, and the portions are bigger and cheaper. With the arrival of tourists, this all changes dramatically. The city not only comes to life, it is overflowing with people. In the morning, everyone is heading towards the sea and the streets are so crowded that it’s hard to walk in the opposite direction. In the evening, people go to the promenade. The promenade in Budva is quite wide, but during the season my wife and I try not to walk along it. The first changes in the city occur on or around the first of September. Some of the cafes close, take their sunbeds off the beach and go to count their earnings for the season. This is due to the weather. Strong gusty winds often blow in Montenegro in winter. They even have their own name - bora. And when the bora comes down from the mountains to the coast, it blows away everything that is not nailed or tied down. These are winter winds; in summer, gusts occur, but not as often and not as strong. That’s why many owners of summer cafes actually dismantle their establishments right after the end of summer and move them to another place for the winter. And some literally board up windows and doors to reopen them in the summer. The season you visit Budva for the first time will greatly influence your first impressions. In winter, you will find an empty promenade with not very pleasant winds, closed cafes, and no one on the street. In the summer, you will hide from the sun and heat, make your way past the crowds of tourists and sometimes wait in line to be seated in good cafes. It was interesting to observe these changes.

Six months. It took about that long to adapt to the country. It was then that we started to communicate with the city. I found a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym (I wrote about it in detail here), and Yaroslava found a tango class and a job. Somewhere around this time, we switched from tourist mode to expat mode. We already knew and understood how the city lives, what people do for a living, what the traditions and mores are, found the best and favorite routes for navigating the city, which store has the cheapest bananas and where to eat. We started to make friends among the local population. Sometimes they are café owners, sometimes waiters, sometimes other employees. My club became almost a second family for me. I was there 3-4 days a week, talking to people, studying, training. The sports community is one of the best I’ve ever known. The community in a martial arts club is the best of the sports ones. When you have a common interest, even the language barrier doesn’t get in the way. By the way, speaking of language. All this time we have been living with the idea that we are not here for long. We were about to leave. That’s why we never started learning the language. It seemed unnecessary at the time. But we still did not leave and did not learn the language. Although it has a lot in common with all Slavic languages. Here we experienced the benefits of living among native speakers, where you don’t even learn the language, but you already know half of it because you hear it every day. That’s exactly what happened to us. The first days when we arrived here, we didn’t understand a word, but a year later we could talk about simple topics, or at least understand what the locals were saying to us. It was a bit shameful, though, when I met a man from Pakistan at the post office and he spoke Montenegrin to the postman. The postman asked how long the Pakistani had been learning the language, and the answer was 1 year. At that time, I had just lived in Montenegro for a year and was far from fluent.

Montenegro is a very small country compared to Ukraine, but it is very diverse. It is as big as our region in terms of area, and the entire population is slightly larger than the number of people who lived in pre-war Mariupol. It is hard to overestimate the natural beauty here. The sea, mountains, rivers, lakes, waterfalls, winter resorts - you can find everything here, and most importantly, you don’t have to go far to find it. Wherever you live in Montenegro, there is a good chance that you will see it almost from your window. If we take settlements, there is one large city, the capital Podgorica, and it has all the usual options for a city person. Its population is half of the whole of Montenegro. The rest are scattered in small towns, mostly on the waterfront, but also in the north of the country. Often, these towns don’t have everything you need, so you take a bus or car and drive to the next one. We did this even when we wanted to walk along the promenade of another city in the evening. At first it was strange, but in terms of time and the structure itself, it’s like going from Troyeshchyna to the center of Kyiv for a walk in the evening. The cuisine in Montenegro is quite simple and not complicated. Meat is a cult. It can be ordered in any cafe and in any form, and cevapi and pleskavica are simply symbols of these places. Almost every menu offers a dish called “meshene meso”. This is if you want to try different types, you will be brought a portion of half a kilo or more, enjoy. The choice and price of seafood makes it seem as if the country is landlocked. The choice is limited and the prices are high. Street food is represented by the same grilled meat, giant pizza sold by the slice, and gyros, a shawarma-like thing. The quality of the food is not super high, the country is still small and most of the food is imported from its neighbors.

We lived in Montenegro for a year and a half. We saw the full life cycle of a resort town with its season and off-season. We learned more about the local people, their culture, habits, traditions, and lifestyle. We traveled almost all over the Balkans and felt the little-noticed but still present differences between such close peoples of this region. We learned more about history, geopolitics, and relationships. We fully enjoyed the mountains, fjords and the most beautiful sea I have ever seen. I discovered a new sporting hobby in the form of bjj and found real friends in this club. This is definitely a positive side. But there is another one. I haven’t seen my family and friends for a year and a half, and I’m slowly losing touch with many of them. Living with the constant realization that you’re looking at the sea, while in Ukraine people are looking at the walls of bomb shelters. This always makes me feel guilty that I was lucky to be abroad when the full-scale invasion began. That people are now fighting for our freedom and independence there, and I am far away from these actions. Only donations to the Armed Forces help a little. But this is the duty of every conscious Ukrainian today. It is not easy to live in emigration, but these difficulties are nothing compared to living under constant shelling, under occupation, and especially in the trenches.

This chapter of life in Montenegro is now over for us. We have moved to another country and have to get used to the local rules and habits again. But now it is much easier with our experience. We packed our entire life into two suitcases, before that we moved out of our rented Kyiv apartment, and now our home is wherever these two suitcases fall. Many people dreamed of living like this: not being tied to a location, constantly traveling, and moving freely around the world. But it’s much more comfortable to do so when you have a safe place to return to. The experience of living abroad for a long time is very valuable. We discovered a lot about ourselves and the world, changed a lot of opinions and prejudices, grew up and learned to take responsibility for our lives, broadened our horizons and saw how people live in different countries. This is certainly a great experience, and it’s a pity that it happened under such conditions.