Considering the poor theatrical offer of this year's "Bar Chronicle", on the last day of August, we went with friends to Tivat to see "The Great Drama" at the National Theater from Belgrade. This drama about a family of Montenegrin colonists in Vojvodina, written and directed by Siniša Kovačević, has been playing for twenty-one years, as its actors point out, "on the map more". I was unlucky that we spent more than an hour looking for a parking place in Tivat, so in my haste I forgot my jacket in the car and by the time of the break I was freezing, and that there was a huge man sitting in front of me and blocking half the stage, and the one next to me the whole time, I guess out of habit , shook his leg. The other bad luck was that that night was the finale of "Purgatory", so awards were handed out for the whole hour, and one of the laureates was exalted.
When I came back after the break with my jacket and warmed up, I enjoyed it to the end, surrendering to the rush of emotions that the play bursts with and not noticing anyone around me anymore.
That's what it means to wear a jacket at the right time!
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I regret that I didn't see Tanasi Uzunović, now deceased, in the role of Zaria Vučić, but his replacement, Lepomir Ivković, was very good, perhaps the best of all on the stage when it comes to the Montenegrin accent. There is also the main character, the excellent Vuk Kostić, who occasionally skits.
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From this journey, which, due to some accident, lasted more than two and a half hours, I will remember one lady from Tivat in particular. Since I saw that she was behind the wheel of a vehicle with Tivat registration, I asked her, after our unsuccessful attempts, if she knew where we could park the car. She said she didn't know, everything was overbooked, but that she would try the parking lots of some buildings and that we should follow her. In the next half hour, she patiently drove around Tivat in front of us and circled the one-way streets, until a free place appeared. We didn't even get to thank her, she just waved her hand, whistled and left.
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For more than three decades, I cannot understand why the summer festivals in Bar, Budva, Tivat, Herceg Novi and Kotor do not jointly organize guest theater performances, writers, painters and other artists from the former Yugoslavia, reduce costs and have quality programs. For example, out of nine theater performances at this year's Tivat "Purgatory", only one was hosted in Bar...
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I recently signed a petition to save the "Dr. Simo Milošević" Institute. Sanctions, wars, unsuccessful privatizations... devastated that Montenegrin brand. But he is still breathing, fortunately for his patients.
A reader, who stayed at the Institute for a week in August, wrote to me: "Please help preserve the Institute, for the sake of us who go there regularly, but also for the professional and kind doctors, physiotherapists and nurses there, and the pleasant staff." I watched the young and the old in wheelchairs, people who use walkers, crutches and canes, whose lives are not easy, how optimistically they go for life-saving treatments.
A man in a wheelchair asked the waitress in the Institute's restaurant:
'Do you know how much I want to go home?'
'How much?'
'Not many!'
'Don't worry, you'll come to us again.'
Two wheelchair users from the north of Montenegro have been coming for 13 years. They are very satisfied, although they say that in the last few years the situation has changed: physiotherapists used to take them to the beach and help them swim. Now there is nothing of that, there are not enough physiotherapists.
The taxi driver told me: 'The Institute is beautiful, just until it rains!' And, indeed, in the Institute you can see puddles of water and a warning: 'Caution, slippery floor.'
I think businessmen and famous athletes and artists should be encouraged to donate money to the Institute. And after the reputation of hospitals and medical institutions in the world, to name renovated rooms, blocks, wings, departments after them... For example, 'Wing C – Nikola Vučević', etc."
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A new school year has begun. Why have we stumbled so far as a society? Because education has failed. And why has education failed so much? Because society has failed. Speed bike…
And, again, young parents generally reason: if their child is not with this and that teacher, he will not enroll in Harvard and his future is ruined. They will be terribly angry that, possibly, their wish was not fulfilled. Of course, after a month they will come to those same pedagogues and psychologists who made up the classes to apologize and say that their child, in fact, got a wonderful, best teacher.
This enrollment problem is a general Montenegrin problem, which can be easily solved on principle, while schools on the coast and in Podgorica have an additional, much larger one: they do not have enough capacity to accommodate all students, and in some classes a third (mainly Russians and Ukrainians) do not know our language. Neither they nor their parents. No one is seriously trying to solve the problem of overbooked schools and the language barrier.
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