The city of Kotor's Montenegrin-to-English translation is "kot" + "tor" = "cat city".
There's an old adage about good writing that urges to "show, don't tell". And with respect to the city's english meaning, that's exactly what it did.
Okay, so I lied. "Kotor" has no phonetic or etymological relation to cats. But the city does leave out water and food for the many street cats to stay alive which for someone who grew up with cats (me) feels like I'm in heaven (paradise-wise, not dead-wise).
I have skinny-dipped one time in my life: in my grandma's screened-in pool in Tampa, Florida at age 8. It was extremely liberating as if I was bathing in the world's biggest tub. I was a little matzah ball swimming around freely in a massive tanker of warm chicken broth. Since then, I've always been eager to do it again.
I don't remember how, but somehow five others and I committed to swimming in the nude, but then all flaked because the temperature had dropped so dramatically by nighttime. Then we flaked on flaking and decided to do it anyway.
There were three boys, three girls, and it was a wholesome experience. At first, we all just stood in the sand of the beach, everyone nervous about throwing ourselves at the mercy of a frigid ocean, without the usual thin layer of nylon to protect 10% of our body. If my grandma's pool was matzah ball soup, we were now diving into a murky, day-old gazpacho.
We stripped down, sprinted into the water, swam around, and then uncomfortably dried off and re-clothed in the cold darkness. There's few activities as freeing as skinny-dipping: fake calling in sick to work, drinking straight from a wine bottle, and pulling off a major heist on the Bellagio, the Mirage, and the MGM grand with 10 of your lawless friends.
Before arriving at Old Town Hostel in Kotor, I had been warned about a guy named Connor. "Warned" is the wrong word. I was told about him in the same way you'd tell someone "don't turn around right now, but the guy sitting behind you has three arms." The anecdote passed along to me was that Connor had alleged he possessed the ability to control the clouds' movements by waving his hands. He failed to mention his superhuman ability to fall asleep in a room full of loud people dancing to loud music.
