What do you love about where you live?
There is plenty to love about this country and what I love the most is our “easy mode” of life. We really take our “pomalo” seriously. This has a bit of a dark side as well because sometimes we are too complaisant because we don’t want to be bothered in life. If you take a stroll down the street of big cities in Croatia during work hours, I can guarantee you will see bars full of people having their coffee. Coffee drinking is a big ritual here. I am not a coffee drinker anymore, but I do participate in it and even when I call someone to meet up in a bar, I will ask them to get a cup of coffee with me. It’s how we verbalize the need to sit in a bar for 2+ hours while doing absolutely nothing.
Also, for a small country, we got plenty of experiences to offer. I am starting to sound like a tourism pitch, but hear me out. We have the Adriatic sea for summer holidays, we got mountains for those that prefer hiking, there’s a lot of adrenaline adventures you can do, we also have amazing food if you are into gastro-tourism and so on and so on. I am also starting to sound like an absolute hypocrite because whenever I plan for a vacation, I plan how to get myself onto a plane and out of the country.
One random thing I will also throw in here is that I love how safe Croatia is. Croatia was actually named the safest country for people to walk at night. I always see on Tiktok and other social media platform how people, women especially, discuss safety precautions they take and that was the first time that I thought to myself that I don’t really think about it a lot because I rarely felt like I was in danger in my own country. I do stay safe, don’t get me wrong! I will always avoid walking alone at night if I can, I never go running during the night in places where there’s no people around and if I am coming from a night out with my friends, we always check in with each other if we got home safely, but never have I ever held my keys between my fingers when I walked home or feared that someone might attack me. I am not saying that crime and other things don’t happen here but generally speaking, Croatia is safe.
If I am going to think a bit about the area where I specifically live, I think that my favorite thing is that I am in the middle of everything but it isn’t too crowded, too loud or too fast. The only thing I hate here is the traffic and I don’t even have a car. I went to a standup show where only foreigners did their bits and all of them, and I mean ALL of them, complained about the traffic and how bad it is.
One thing that I didn’t know how to appreciate growing up (I lived in a rural area) was how good produce is when you grow it yourself. I hope that, as a society, we will not make the shift towards people only buying produce instead of growing it if they have the resources. I hated the labor that came with it and getting up at the crack of dawn to harvest potatoes, but man I do miss going out to my mom’s garden in the summer to pick some fresh, juicy tomatoes. Speaking of food, Croatian food is great. I also grew up eating a lot of Bosnian food, because my family is originally from there so let’s just say I spent my life eating well.
This post could go on indefinitely because I will always remember some small detail, so I will stop it right here. Where do you live and what’s it like?
From my travelling, which has so far been only across Europe because that’s what I can afford, I have to say that the city I loved most was Madrid and if I ever get the chance to live there for a year at least, I will be taking it!
You can get your copy of my first novel on Amazon: Little Rebellion
Poetry Books: Identity Crisis, Rehab
I published a new video, check it out: