Podgorica Is A Great Place To Do Nothing

I am terrible at slowing down.

When I travel, I want to see as much as possible and do as much as possible. I like to walk for hours, sometimes purposefully getting lost, just to get a feel for the city. Even those rare days when I wake up slightly hungover and certainly sleep-deprived, I still tend to force myself out of bed to pound the pavement. If I’m traveling, I intend to take full advantage of the time I have.

But sometimes, slowing down is a good thing.

I arrived in Podgorica after a long overnight bus ride from Belgrade. I never meant to go to Montenegro’s capital city at all, but the beachside cities I planned to see had no empty beds for the Saturday night I was arriving. Weekends don’t mean much when traveling until a situation like this arises. So, I decided to kill a night in Podgorica, a city about which I’d heard only lackluster reviews.

You know what? I loved Podgorica.

But it had nothing to do with Podgorica.

After a fitful sleep on a bumpy bus, I arrived in Montenegro exhausted and on the verge of a cold. I spent the whole day sleeping in my hostel dorm room, which was blissfully empty until early evening. The woman working at Montenegro Hostel Podgorica gave me homemade soup and otherwise let me be. The room had a desk, so when I wasn’t sleeping or eating soup, I set up my computer and started working on some writing that I hadn’t had a chance to get to.

I felt no pressure to explore the city. There wasn’t that much to explore.

It was wonderful.

I did end up taking a brief walk around Podgorica at night with a Czech couple from my hostel, but it only served to reinforce what I’d heard: Podgorica isn’t a beautiful city. There’s nothing heart-achingly impressive about it. It’s just very normal, nearly nondescript. The buildings are simply, boxy, some modern, some just ugly. Podgorica has no WOW factor. It simply exists in its functional form.

I left Podgorica well-rested and full of energy and enthusiasm for the next leg of my trip. Thank goodness for lovely little Podgorica—it took a city with little to see to make me get some well-needed rest.