Profile:Croatia

Meet Croatia

- Coastline country mirroring Italy to the east

- Severed ties with Yugoslavia beginning 1990 leading to the "Homeland War" '91-'95

- Speak Croatian (nearly identical to Albanian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Bosnian)

Stray Dog Rating (out of 5): Oh sure, by day it's not too bad but come dusk the mongrel cats come out from the protected architecture sites to clean up, at least in Dubrovnik(3.5). Otherwise it wasn't so bad (1). Didn't see a dog that was stray (0).

Cuisine: To borrow a phrase from southeast Asia - same, same, but different. Every restaurant has an identical menu of fish and meat, leaving me with grilled vegetables and inferior attempts at Italian dishes like risotto (just regular rice) and particularly mediocre pizza. With the bears whoever felt like cooking prepared from the cellar full of vegetables, potatoes, pasta and rice with plenty of garlic. When nobody wanted to cook bread ripped from the loaf with local honey had to suffice.

Sidewalk Safety: In the village these obviously did not exist but you were most likely to see few vehicles out tractors, if you did though the roads were narrow that only one car could really pass at a time. The old cities had limestone smoothed to a marble shine from thousands of years of treading and restricted vehicles which was nice (watch out for the delivery vehicles in Split though.)

Rambling Impressions: It seems necessary to break this into Bear and Non-Bear impressions for these were entirely different. With the bears there was a great sense of community in the small, somewhat remote village of a few hundred. One shop, one bar, one restaurant allowed people to live simple lives, primarily based on agriculture and forestry. I really enjoyed the friendliness and helpfulness that this brought, even as a volunteer who was quickly immersed into this even through a translator.

Non-Bear had its pluses too. Driving through the mountains, littered with lengthy highway tunnels, is gorgeous as the pines mix with the deciduous trees on their side. Once you cross you've got vibrant blue sea overlooked by the range. Here are resplendent walled cities of Zadar, Split and Dubrovnik in order of increasing beauty. Dubrovnik is utterly gorgeous and worthy of its barrage of visitors.