My parents came from Croatia in the 60s and had 4 children in Sweden, so I’m born and raised as a Swede. Yet I have been to Croatia since I was a newborn baby, my mom once lost me on a train in Croatia in 85, only to find a group of Swedish women she met before had taken care of me the whole time.

So I have probably been most summers in Croatia as a child, but I made very few consistent memories from those trips.

After living there as an adult for extended periods I thought I’d write down the things I’ll miss, the things I won’t miss, and some other observations that I made while there. Of course things are from my unique perspective, I speak the language well enough to converse fluently with the locals.

What I’ll miss

The people

Whenever this question comes up I always think of the daily interactions with hundreds of strangers. The contrast between how open people are in Croatia and Sweden is very strong.

When I first came down in 2022 I was unshaven and my hair was long and unkempt, but it doesn’t matter what you look like, people will have no fear at all about striking up a conversation in the street with you.

Probably 9 out of 10 walks with my dog I ended up exchanging at least a few words with a stranger. Compare that to Sweden where I’d say the opposite is closer to the truth.

Safety

Never felt as safe as I did walking around Croatia. Kids still respect their elders, people help each other spontaneously, or at least ask if you need help. A guy once flagged me down because he was helping an old lady find her home, but he was from out of town so he needed my help to find the street.

Just like in Sweden kids walk to school themselves, and I’ve seen several cases of people picking up trash spontaneously if it’s near a bin.

Although I also saw an old man walk right up to the river and just dump his garbage into it, with no hesitation. The old ways persist…

The stuff you see on the news in Sweden about shootings, stabbings, explosions, it’s unheard of down there.

Didn’t only feel safer on a local level but I felt safer globally somehow, due to all the unrest and sabre-rattling going on in Sweden at the moment.

Blablacar

It’s a ride-sharing app that connects you to people with cars who might be driving somewhere and have room. So much fun, so social, such a good way to meet other people and I always had very nice drivers.

The honesty

People are more honest and more open about saying what they feel. Topics like salary and politics are often whispered about in Sweden, while in Croatia people will openly rant to strangers on the street about them.

For better or for worse but it seems like it stems from the gossip culture in villages. You meet someone on the train and within 1 hour you know all the maladies and relatives in her village.

My relatives

Love all the relatives I’ve met from Slovenia to Bosnia. I was always welcome to stay there, for all the holidays and whenever I visited. I always felt more like part of the family than a guest.

Prices

Croats get mad at me for this one but I was there with a Swedish salary so everything was pretty cheap, especially services like barber, delivery, home improvement and so on.

Nature & history

Besides people being very diverse from region to region, nature is dramatic. Going from mountains, gorges, passes, serpentine roads, waterfalls, to deep forrests where you still find bear, to the rocky coast with its blue water, to the amazing vistas on the motorway, to fields stretching into the horizon.

It was a trip living near a trafficked river, tourist boats would pull up from Switzerland and Austria like floating hotels.

I lived at the bottom of a prehistoric sea, the Panonian. I lived in a former Roman city where houses still have roman saints on the corners, the origin of street names according to some. I walked around in a Roman palace that had been taken over by people after Rome’s authority weakened. I’ll never forget seeing houses built up against the walls of the Diocletian palace.

The wildlife

It was mind blowing just meeting turtles sunning themselves in the park, in the middle of Zagreb. Or seeing them swim around the docks of Osijek, where people fish every day. The giant storks will walk around the same fields where my dog played.

What I won’t miss

The infrastructure

Living in Croatia, and of course travel in other countries such as Marocco, made me appreciate what Swedish bureaucracy has done for its citizens.

Little things like not allowing hedges or walls to be over 120cm without a permit makes it so that there are very few blind corners where you can’t see traffic coming.

In Croatia they clearly recognize the problem, but instead buy thousands of signs to warn pedestrians a car might come around the corner suddenly.

The lack of trash bins. In the bigger cities they do try, for example special trash bins for dog waste have been introduced. But it’s still often very hard to find where to throw you dog waste. In spite of that I can’t remember seeing any more dog waste on the ground in Croatia than in Sweden.

Trains

You should expect a slow train when it passes over the Dinaric Alps, but regardless the entire train infrastructure needs a major overhaul and I think it would help tourism.

For a while train was literally my only method of transport between Osijek and Zagreb, and it takes 5.5 hours. You can watch the grass grow outside your window. On the plus side I did get to see some cool wildlife.

As a dog owner without a car in Croatia you’re almost stuck in certain places. Busses refuse to allow it into the cabin, insist on locking dogs up in the luggage compartment. Never.

Busses

There are plenty of inter-city busses going longer stretches of 4-10 hours for example. But I haven’t taken one of those in 15 years probably.

City busses and trams work pretty well in Zagreb, and even Split has an app now. But Osijek had a horrible system where tourists have to buy one card per person, and fill it with money.

The traffic

The poor infrastructure promotes dangerous traffic habits already, it doesn’t help that people park all over the sidewalk, just leave their car in a crosswalk to go to the bakery, drive across squares and walking streets if they have to. They’re often very fast and aggressive drivers.

Made me appreciate the fact that I could walk from home to a big park for 1 hour without crossing a car road in Malmö. If you just crossed one safe elevated zebra crossing, you could walk for 2 hours without worrying about car traffic.

In Croatia I got this sense that a lot of people either have immense trust in drivers, or just don’t think about the dangers. I’m leaning towards the latter, seeing as I witnessed more accidents and near accidents during my time there than probably the last 20 years in Sweden.

Personally I just can’t trust drivers so I felt the most unsafe in traffic. I like the Swedish model of zero-trust, using their infrastructure to promote safer traffic habits and restrict traffic to prevent it from driving reckless.

Car culture

Not much focus is placed on living without a car, commuting without a car, shopping without a car.

You can survive as a pedestrian in the larger cities, but come out on the country and you’d pretty much be stuck at home. Unless you dared venture out on the country roads on your bike. Good luck and Godspeed.

I totally get the reliance on cars in the mountains of course, everything is real cramped and shoved together so you often have to travel to any stores. Sidewalks are barely existing at certain points.

Bicyclists have to pick between bothering pedestrians on a 2 meter wide sidewalk, or to be in traffic with the aggrevated drivers passing them too close or honking at them.

I will never miss having to squeeze between cars on the sidewalk, or forced to walk on the road because of the same parked car taking up the whole sidewalk. They respect their elders but once you get old in Croatia your mobility drops to near zero due to the lousy infrastructure and lackluster regulation.

Mineral rich water

Regardless of potential health benefits, I will not miss having to clean up after it.

Do miss the taste of Jamnica sparkling water though, never imagined they could have a distinct taste until I came back and only had Ramlösa or Loka.

The insects

Especially the mosquitoes in Osijek. It’s such an issue that you get info mail every year about how we combat them this time. Propeller planes fly low over the city spraying god-only-knows what to get rid of them. Sometimes vans drive through the street leaving a mist of pesticides over the city.

The post office

Wasn’t sure about including this but I have experienced a lot of easily fixable issues with their postal service.

The main issue being that they are unable to enter correct information when sending packages. So instead of turning their screens towards the customer they just plow forwards and don’t care about the problems they’re causing by sending packages with incorrect address information.

This is a human problem that can happen anywhere, which is exactly why the Swedish post service turn their screen and let the customer proof read everything before it’s sent. I had to make the Croatian teller show me her screen, and even then it’s hard to see it since they’re up on a dais above you like an old school pharmacist.

Another fixable issue with their delivery services is that they don’t understand foreign phone numbers at all, usually due to poor formatting on their work orders.

Observations

Kissing noises

People almost exclusively make kissing noises at dogs in Croatia. Never heard anything like it, an entire culture makes the same noise every time they see a dog walk past.

My dog being a true ethnic Swedish dog of course ignores this and keeps walking. 😂

Graffiti

I have never seen so little graffiti as I did in Croatia. There is graffiti but mostly well made murals supporting the local football team, the school, the troops or something like that. There are very few instances of just pointless tagging and art pieces with no relation to society in general. Most in Zagreb of course, but still very little compared to large Swedish cities.