A few years ago, I packed up my life (again) and moved to Montenegro. I didn’t know much about it then beyond a few postcard images. I figured I’d stay a year, maybe two. I’m still here, and most days I’m glad about that. But “most days” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence, and this post is about the parts of living here that I still haven’t made peace with.

The Good Stuff

The hospitality! When i moved my neighbors gave me a bottle homemade rakija. I’m not much of a drinker, but I’m afraid I’m going to become one here, hehe. I’ve been waved into strangers’ courtyards for coffee mid-walk and somehow ended up staying two hours. People here don’t perform warmth. They just operate that way. There’s also a slower relationship with time that I didn’t know I needed. The pace took some adjusting to coming from a culture obsessed with productivity, but I’ve come to think it’s one of the healthiest things about life here. And then there’s the landscape! And it honestly deserves the postcards. Driving the road from Kotor up into the mountains, watching the bay shrink below you switchback by switchback, still gets me every time.

The Trash

Here’s where it gets harder to write. Montenegro’s constitution literally declares it an “ecological state”, but the country struggles badly with waste. There are reportedly around 400 unregulated and illegal landfills scattered across the country, and a recent international comparison found Montenegro among the worst in the world for household waste separation, alongside Kosovo and Albania, with recyclable waste often not sorted post-collection, and people given no incentives to separate waste at the source.

I die a bit inside when I pass a riverbank on a hike, and see that it’s quietly become a dump.

I don’t think it’s indifference exactly. I think it’s a country where the infrastructure to do better simply hasn’t caught up to the intention, and in the meantime the path of least resistance wins.

The Dogs

The stray dog situation took me longer to process emotionally than the trash did. Why? It’s a living creature looking at you on a street corner!

Montenegro has a real stray population problem in some places, and from what I’ve read and seen, it’s less about dogs being born wild and more about dogs being let go.

Spaying and neutering isn’t culturally widespread, which directly fuels overpopulation, and although animal welfare laws technically exist, they’re rarely enforced. Some municipalities run shelters, others effectively don’t, and the ones that exist are often under-resourced.

What frustrates me isn’t the existence of stray dogs, honestly, plenty of countries have that. It’s the apparent absence of a coordinated, funded response. It feels like a problem everyone agrees is sad and nobody with the authority to fix it treats as urgent.

Holding Both Things at Once

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to write a post that turns into a foreigner’s complaint list, and that’s not actually how I feel about this place. I think you can love somewhere and still be honest that it’s failing in specific, fixable ways. The same country that will feed you until you can’t move and treat you like family within a week of meeting you is also a country where the river by the road has trash in it and a dog with no home will follow you for three blocks hoping you’ve got something to give.

I don’t think those two things cancel each other out. I think they’re both just true, at the same time, in the same place. And three years in, I’ve stopped expecting them not to be.

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