[00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Today, I'm going to tell you about my recent holiday in Montenegro.

[00:00:06] What I want you to do, is to try and listen carefully and try to understand everything. I'm going to speak as naturally as I normally would, and I'm not going to slow down my speech.

I'm not going to stop myself from using complex or difficult words or phrasal verbs. I'm just going to speak like a native speaker would and tell you all about my holiday.

[00:00:32] Something crazy happened in the airport on the way back home, so make sure you stay to the end to find out what happened.

[00:00:39] If this is too hard for you, you can go into the description, join my free English learning community, and in there, you will find a transcript to all my YouTube videos, including this one.

[00:00:52] So me and ten other friends went to Montenegro recently. We booked this holiday a very long time ago.

With a big group of friends, especially 11 people, it's quite difficult for 11, 28, 29, 27-year-olds to find a date or a week where everyone is free, especially in summer.

Everybody in the UK who doesn't have children or isn't a teacher really wants to go away before about the 19th of July and after September the 1^st.

Because in between those two dates are the six weeks where all school children have their summer holidays and that's when the holiday prices go up significantly.

So, everyone wants to go before the 19th of July, around that date, or after September the 1st, and we were thinking about when we were going, trying to find dates, and no one could find anything.

Even in the early weeks of September, and we had to settle for quite a late date in September. We did do a little bit of research beforehand, to make sure that the weather was going to be nice.

Living in the UK, especially Manchester, the weather is not great here, it rains a lot, so when we pay some money to go abroad, we definitely want to have the sunshine.

[00:02:11] So after our research, it looked like Montenegro was still hot and sunny in September. However, that wasn't really the case. A little bit more about that later.

[00:02:21] We settled on Montenegro as the country we wanted to visit because some people in the group had been to Montenegro about 5 years ago and they really wanted to go back and the rest of the group had never been.

[00:02:33] A lot of people in the UK have been to many places in Europe, especially Spain, France, Italy, for example, but Montenegro is not a very popular tourist destination for British people generally.

[00:02:46] I've heard the tales and the stories about the amazing, beautiful mountains. And I was curious, so I was pretty happy to accept the suggestion of Montenegro.

[00:02:56] My holiday got off to a little bit of a stressful start because we were going on a Friday. And our flight was in the afternoon. I think it was one o'clock. And for some reason I did not pack the night before or even a few days before.

Instead on the Thursday night, me, my girlfriend and her sister watched the new rings of power episode because they come out on Thursday, and instead of packing we did that.

[00:03:20] I regretted this in the morning because once I woke up, we realized how much we had to do that day before getting to the airport around 11 o'clock. And that was a pretty stressful morning, and we were pretty late to the airport.

[00:03:33] Usually people try and get to the airport about two hours before their flights in the UK, and I think we got there about 90 minutes before the flight. In the UK.

It's pretty common place for younger people to have a pint of beer at the airport, regardless of what time it is.

[00:03:50] So once we joined our friends, they were all having a pint of beer, obviously. But we didn't have too much time, and we weren't able to get one, but I don't really mind I didn't really mind.

Once I went on holiday and we were the first flight out of Manchester, and I think it was probably around five-ish in the morning or six-ish in the morning.

[00:04:09] And we were the first, first flight out of Manchester that day. And I remember having a pint of beer at like three or four o'clock in the morning. Just because it's a tradition Call us alcoholics; we just are people of tradition.

[00:04:23] However, even though it was a stressful morning, there were no problems with the flight. We got there pretty smoothly. I think the flight was around 3 hours and a bit.

I downloaded a podcast for the airplane, it was about the Roman Empire and Lex Fridman was interviewing a historian, and it was talking about the Roman Empire for three hours.

[00:04:45] So I think I listened to about an hour of that. I also listened to an audiobook of How to Grow a Successful Community. If you don't know, I have my own community for English learners. If you want to join, it's free, go in the description.

But what else did I do? I also played this really fun game called the flag quiz, because I don't have many apps on my phone or games, for example, but especially ones that work offline without internet connection.

[00:05:11] But I did have this game called the flag quiz, where basically, it's a multiple-choice quiz where they give you a... the name of a country and you have to choose the flag, or they show you a flag and you have to choose the name of the country.

Seems pretty boring, but it was a big challenge. I think there was 199 questions, and I got pretty obsessed with playing this game and I played it all throughout the holiday and I actually eventually completed this game with one of my friends and got 199 out of 199.

So, I might leave a link to this game in the description because it's pretty fun.

[00:05:41] I also started reading my new book on the plane I've started reading a big book. It's got about 800 pages in it called Shantaram.

Not going to go into details, but I got bored of reading Dune and I gave up. I've been reading it for a long time.

[00:05:56] I think I just couldn't get into it because I know the story already. I've watched the two films, so there was no motivation for me to really read it.

[00:06:05] When we got to Montenegro, we left the airport. We were surrounded by taxi men. I did ask the question to one of my friends.

Do you think there's any country in the world where the taxi drivers are mostly women? Because I can, like, when we got to Croatia, you're surrounded by men trying to get you in that taxi, say in Montenegro, the same with probably every country that I've been to outside of an airport.

[00:06:29] There are just 20, 30 men kind of asking you, if you want a taxi, why is it always men? Where are the female taxi drivers?

[00:06:35] After we picked up our rental cars, we drove to our villa, which was about one hour away from the airport. And it was pretty sketchy. The first car that we got into the headlight was broken. So that wasn't ideal.

So, we needed to go back to the dealership or the place where you get the rental car from and exchange our car, no problem.

[00:06:55] Then we drove there. Some people went to the supermarket on the way there, because we were staying in a villa, we had to make our own food. So, it made sense to stop by a big supermarket on the way and pick up some food and booze.

We were pretty hungry because some people ate maybe in the airport or just before we were on a Ryanair flight, so we didn't want to, I… I'm guessing most people didn't get any of the food on… on the flight because plane food is pretty bad and we arrived around six… six-ish, probably seven and we were waiting a while for the cars.

So, I think everyone's pretty hungry. So, we've got some nibbles for the evening. Actually, someone made pasta, which was pretty delicious.

[00:07:34] But let's get to the exciting stuff. What did I do in Montenegro? It was pretty busy. Usually when I go on holiday, it's a little bit more relaxed. Just kind of like experiencing the sun, sunbathing, drinking a few beers, reading my book, just chillaxing.

Sometimes if it's like. Not a city break. If it's a city break, it's a little bit more active, lots of walking, exploring, things like this.

[00:07:55] But some holidays in the sun, especially summer holidays are kind of more relaxation for me, but this holiday was crazy. I've never done so many things in a week.

And because we had three rental cars every day, we basically left the villa, and we did different activities.

So, on one day we went to the beach and the beach was really interesting because at the beach you were surrounded by these huge gorgeous mountains and it was really nice to be at a beach and have like a beautiful, beautiful scenery that wasn't just the beach.

[00:08:27] I just knocked over my water bottle.

[00:08:29] Rewinding one day, the first day actually, we did stay at the villa because that day was supposed to have the nicest weather. It was like sunshine all day, 27 degrees Celsius which in my eyes is ideal.

[00:08:41] After the beach day on the second day, we did go on a road trip and during this road trip, we spent a lot of time in the car getting to these beautiful places.

Because the whole idea of this road trip was going to see the beautiful sights of Montenegro. And the beautiful sights of Montenegro are the landscapes and the mountains.

[00:09:00] So we went in the car, we went up the mountains. There were lots of hairpin turns, like this. Very, very sharp, all the way up the mountain. Luckily on this mountain there were like barricades to kind of block you falling off if you went over the edge.

So, it was pretty difficult to fall off. But the problem with getting up this mountain and getting down was that the path was really narrow and you could only just about squeeze two cars into on, on the, on the road.

[00:09:29] So every time the. A car came past us. You had to really slow down and it was very close.

[00:09:36] However, the views from the top of the mountain were spectacular. I've never seen a place in Europe like this. I've been to New Zealand and the mountain ranges, and the scenery is beautiful, but I haven't seen a place like this in Europe.

[00:09:49] The second part of that day, we went to a little bit more of an undiscovered mountain and the views here were even better, but the path that was very, very dangerous and a little bit dodgy because those turns that I was telling you about, those hairpin turns, this time they had no blockade.

[00:10:09] Or barrier, whatever you want to say, and if you kind of slipped, you'd probably fall to your death. So luckily, no one died.

[00:10:16] After this long journey, we were thinking about going to this lake and going on a boat trip, but it was getting pretty late.

So, we decided just to drive back to Budva, where we were staying. We were staying in the mountains near Budva, actually.

[00:10:28] And on the way back, we stopped at the beach for the sunset, which is beautiful. We all went in the water. It was pretty cold. But it was a beautiful end to a great day.

[00:10:38] That night there was a thunderstorm it was raining pretty hard. When we woke up, because we were so high up in the mountains, it was so foggy or misty that you could hardly see.

And it was really atmospheric to be honest, because you could hear the, hear the thunder, you could see the lightning and it was so misty and foggy… knocked my water bottle over again.

[00:10:58] It was so misty and foggy that it just looked pretty cool from the balcony. Like you'd look around and it was like, well, this is actually pretty weird. It looks pretty odd. It was, it felt like the start of a zombie apocalypse.

[00:11:09] I think the night before we did lots of drinking and we, I think we did a quiz that evening and I think some people got pretty drunk and we stayed up pretty late.

So, we had a very relaxed morning because we knew the storm was coming and we just took it easy. Then in the afternoon, we found this like tavern or this restaurant, which was about an hour's walk away through this nice hike.

[00:11:30] So once it stopped raining, we put on our hiking boots and our jackets. We went on this hike down the mountain and went to this restaurant. This restaurant was completely empty.

No one else was there apart from the owners, but they had lots of kittens and dogs running around, which is pretty cool if you like animals.

[00:11:46] If you don't and you're allergic to them, like one person there, not so enjoyable. I ordered a fish soup from there for five euros. And those kittens and cats were pretty interested in that fish soup.

And they didn't leave me alone the entire meal. But they're pretty cute, so can't complain.

[00:12:02] Once we were done eating there, we had to walk back up the mountain, which was actually pretty challenging. And it was getting dark, so we just got home before it got properly dark. But I was so happy with that day.

And that day was probably one of my favorites because when we woke up, we thought, “Oh no, what are we going to do today?”

[00:12:21] Because we thought it was going to be raining all day, but it turned out to be really fun and that restaurant slash eco-tavern was actually really enjoyable.

[00:12:29] The rest of the trip, we went into Budva for a meal one evening. The restaurant there was great, the waiter was a little bit weird to begin with, but we warmed to his sense of humor by the end, and we tipped him quite nicely.

[00:12:41] Because it was the end of season, there wasn't too much happening in Budva afterwards, we went to this really nice bar and had some drinks there, but around 12 o'clock it seemed like everyone was dying.

We did go to this one club. Type thing and we walked in and did a complete 180 and walked out because it wasn't really our vibe.

[00:12:59] We got a taxi home and the taxi into town was 30 euros per car we got scammed by some Montenegrin taxi drivers and they were arguing about who was able to take us.

[00:13:09] Clearly, they were fighting for scraps of tourists, kind of late into the season. They probably didn't have that much work that night.

So, I think they were arguing about who gets that job because they knew it was quite far away and they knew they could scam us. So, there was a... a night rate, and I've never seen a taxi meter go up so quickly in my life.

[00:13:29] It was like, you're watching the meter and it's like 12, 13, 14, 15. I'm talking about euros. So, it was pretty heavy. So, it was pretty expensive.

And when we got to the top, there was three cars and I could hear some of my, once we arrived, because I was in the last taxi, we could see the two cars in front of ours stopped.

[00:13:48] They were kind of discussing the prices and maybe arguing with the taxi drivers outside of the cars. And the first taxi had charged the group 50 euros. The taxi That was second, charged the group 60 euros, and the taxi that I was in was asking for 70 euros.

So, there was a bit of a dilemma, a bit of disagreement, I think they lied to us, I think they promised to one of the people in the group 30 euros.

[00:14:14] But they obviously did some night rates on their meter or like doubled the meter speed or something like that. So that sucked.

We were able to negotiate on price and we came to like an agreement, but it wasn't really happy, but like, what can you do?

We weren't really gonna argue and cause a problem or a scene with three Montenegrin taxi drivers in the mountains, in the middle of nowhere, where they know where we were staying. Probably not too wise.

The… the money that we had to pay extra split between 11 wasn't. isn't substantial It's not gonna, you know, it's not gonna break the bank. So, it's okay. It was okay in the end.

[00:14:52] Other days we did a boat trip in the lake, which is pretty cool. We also visited the old city of Kotor, which kind of like the beach was really nice because in this old city, you were surrounded by mountains again, and it was pretty unique to be in like an urban space surrounded by like natural beauty.

[00:15:11] Especially those are really high mountains. So every day we were doing something different, lots of drinking, lots of late nights, so after I finished the holiday, I felt like I needed another one.

[00:15:22] Overall, it was a great holiday. I completely loved it. Montenegro was beautiful. I'm sure you will see that from some of the pictures that I will show you. I completely recommend it to people.

[00:15:33] However, I would say do get rental cars because they're pretty necessary and you want them to have that freedom of exploring the beautiful country.

[00:15:41] A great way to wrap up summer and now we're on for the gruelling, cold, miserable, dark, damp winter in the UK.

[00:15:52] If you understood 80, 90 percent of this video or even more, your English is excellent. Well done.

[00:15:59] I completely forgot to mention what happened at the end of the holiday. So, I'll tell you now.

Basically, when we got to the airport, two of our friends checked in to the flight quite late and when they checked in on their phones, it didn't give them a seat number, which is a little bit strange, because usually they give you a seat number.

 You know what seat you're sitting in. But it's said that they didn't have a seat number, and they had to go and check in, in the airport.

So when they, they thought they had checked in properly, but when they went through security and they kind of went to scan their flight boarding pass, they told them, both of them, to go back to where you take your suitcases to check them in and they found out that the flight, Ryanair, the company Ryanair had overbooked the flight so they had sold too many tickets for how many… how many seats the actual plane has.

So, they thought that they might have to, they thought that they might miss their flights because they wouldn't be able to get on. So, they were pretty nervous about that.

[00:17:08] They, it was a Friday and they, they were told that the next flight back to Manchester was on Monday. So, they'd have to stay the entire weekend. And one of them had to go to work on Sunday and do like a handover.

And he wasn't going to be able to make it. I think he was flying to a different country for work on that Monday.

[00:17:27] So that was pretty scary. So that wasn't ideal. They went through and what they had to do was they had to wait, they had to wait until everyone got on the plane to, to see if someone hadn't turned up for their flights and there would be space.

So, we… we kind of said goodbye to them when we were getting on the plane because they had to wait until the very end, we thought they wouldn't be able to get their flights.

[00:17:51] They waited, and luckily, I guess one or two people didn't show up for their flight, so they were allowed to get onto the airplane and come home with us, but it was a bit of a rollercoaster of, “Oh no, we can't… we've… we can't get on the flight. Actually, it could be nice to stay in Montenegro for a few more days” and then, “Oh, actually, we are going back home.”

[00:18:12] So, bit of a, a weird situation, but I couldn't believe it that… airplane companies and airlines are legally allowed to oversell the flights to make more money.

It doesn't seem like it would be profitable because they'd have to pay for compensation. So, they'd have to pay for people to stay in hotels and their next flights.

[00:18:35] And things like this and probably spending money for the days that they were stuck as well. So, it doesn't seem like it would make money and be profitable, but I guess someone is running the numbers and it probably does work out profitable, which is why they do do it, I guess.

[00:18:54] But still, it seems very unethical to, to do this because… I'm sure some people… this has happened to some people, and they have missed very important flights and missed things like weddings or things related to work. So, I didn't even know that companies were allowed to do this, but pretty shocking.