All right, well, welcome back to the podcast, everybody.
In this episode, we have special guest, Sarah Dyson.
Sarah is the founder of the website, Expat in Croatia,
which helps, you guessed it, expats in Croatia
with things like citizenship, health care, and daily life.
In this episode, we're going to hear
why she moved to Croatia from the US
without any Croatian heritage and what her experience has
been like after more than a decade of living here.
Sarah, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Hi, Stanko.
Good morning.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah, of course.
Really excited to have you on.
I think you're sort of a, I don't know if I'll say a legend
in the, maybe I will say a legend in the Croatian expat
community.
Oh, that's crazy to hear.
I mean, yeah, I've seen you all over.
You're all over social media and everything.
And I know you do a lot for the Croatian expats.
And I'm sure you get this.
I'll ask you this question first right off the bat
because I'm sure you get this all the time,
both from expats and Croatians living here.
But why did you move to Croatia?
I mean, you have no Croatian heritage.
You were living in the US.
Tell me a little bit about life before Croatia
and what led up to you coming here.
OK.
Well, from the time I was a small child,
I always wanted to live in Europe.
I didn't have a particular country in mind.
I just felt like this was the continent
I was supposed to live on.
That's what I thought.
And when I first left Texas, which when you leave Texas,
it's like leaving the country.
That's kind of how it is.
It's almost like you're a little bit of a traitor
when you leave Texas.
It has a really super strong culture,
which is I was thinking about.
I was just in Texas for three weeks.
And it's almost like the culture of Texas
is just as strong as the culture of Croatia.
It's almost like they can exist in the same universe
at the same time.
It's pretty strange.
But I left Texas when I was 23.
I moved to New York to go to culinary school.
I'd already gotten a degree in Texas,
but I wanted to switch gears and become a pastry chef,
which I did for a little while.
And then I moved to the Netherlands.
I moved to Amsterdam.
And I was there for as long as they would allow me
to be there as an American, which was only about a year.
And then they told me kindly in a letter that I had to leave.
So I went back to the States.
I went to California for a few years.
And I really wanted to go back to Europe.
And well, specifically, I wanted to go back to Amsterdam.
I really loved it there.
And I was trying to find a job.
I couldn't find any company that would sponsor me.
And it's just the cost of living had kind of gotten out
of control.
And at the same time, I was planning a trip to go to Italy.
And in that research, Croatia got on my radar.
And I didn't know anything about Croatia.
I will fully admit that.
The education I got in Texas was like,
you really only learn whatever has to do
with the creation of Texas.
If that country was not involved in the birth of Texas,
you did not learn about it.
So I didn't know about Croatia.
And the more I looked into it, the more intriguing it appeared.
And so I didn't go to Italy at all.
I just went to Croatia for a holiday in 2011.
And I liked it.
And when it was clear that Amsterdam
wasn't going to work out, I was like, OK, what
if I just go to Croatia?
And I'll start freelancing, doing my own business,
and see if it works out.
And if it doesn't, then I'll retreat back to the States
and figure out something else.
And if it does, awesome.
And within six months, I just absolutely fell in love
with Croatia.
I didn't ever want to leave.
Obviously, it's not up to me.
It's up to the Croatian government
and how long I could stay.
But I did everything that they asked of me.
And I wouldn't say it was easy.
There were lots of stumbles and hoops of fire and stuff.
But now I'm here 11 years.
And I can stay as long as I want.
So yay.
That's essentially my Croatia origin story.
Well, what did friends and family say when, I mean,
I guess, coming to Europe in general,
moving from Texas, from the US, moving to Europe,
were they supportive of that?
Did that come as a shock to them?
It did.
I mean, some of them are still trying
to wrap their minds around it.
I mean, I wasn't kidding when I said,
like, when you leave Texas, it's not a good thing.
It's really hard to sell the idea of why anyone
would want to leave, and especially to go abroad.
It's just not a thing that really happens.
I mean, even in my friend group growing up,
one person maybe did a long study abroad for about a year.
But I'm kind of the only person who really went off
and left the continent.
So it's a hard sell.
It's hard for people, especially the older members of my family,
to really understand why to do this.
And it's hard to explain it.
I think Croatia is really special.
I think we can all agree that Croatia is super special.
It has this energy that you just can't really describe.
And I want to so much capture that for people
who haven't experienced it and try to explain, well,
what is it that you love about Croatia?
Like, oh, well, I can go down the list.
And I can say, oh, I love the strong community.
I love the culture.
I love the rocky.
I love the sea.
I love the nature.
I love all these different things, the quality of life.
But you say those, and you don't really
people can't really understand it
until they've experienced it.
So it's hard for me to communicate it
when someone hasn't seen it.
So because of that, it's still not completely understood.
But I will say, after all this time, I was just at home.
And so I was with a lot of my relatives.
I think they're starting to get it,
not because they still understand
the concept of going away and doing this thing.
But they see how happy I am here and how
I've been able to build this thing that I'm so proud of.
And that, ultimately, is what matters to them.
Wow.
Well, that's good to hear.
Yeah.
And I want to talk about what you built and expats in Croatia
in a little bit.
But before that, I have one more question
about coming over here.
What were some of your expectations
coming to Croatia?
And did everything go according to plan?
Was everything as you expected?
Or were there any curveballs or things
you weren't ready for when you came here?
I didn't have any expectations.
I knew nothing.
I literally knew nothing.
I mean, I didn't know the language.
I didn't know any of the people.
I didn't know the history.
I didn't know the culture.
Really, truly nothing.
When I came here in 2011 on holiday,
I spent 23 hours in soccer.
I spent four days in Split, two days on Par,
two days in Zabrovnik.
And that was it.
And that's not enough to get any kind of sense of anything.
I didn't know what my requirements were
to even stay here weekly.
I found that out from our real estate broker.
She was the one who said, you need to get an OI.
But I don't know what an OI is.
But I'll go along for the ride, and I'll sign whatever it is.
To me, I just wanted to be here.
So I did everything that I could to do that.
I went along the path.
And it was really hard to find that information.
But the creations around me really
helped me figure that all out.
So I didn't have, like I said, if I went into it,
the only expectation I had going into it was,
if this doesn't work out, it's OK.
I will go back home, and I will try again, and it'll be fine.
So I like going into things without any expectations,
because that way, you're not disappointed.
You're just surprised with whatever it is that you find.
In terms of things being hard or challenging, I found it wasn't.
The only culture shock I had was it just
felt so different from what I was used to,
but in a positive way.
People were so kind and generous and welcoming.
And that was like, as an American,
I was suspicious because that's just how
you're raised to be suspicious.
At least I was.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s, you're always
taught that everyone's a stranger.
Everyone's had to get you or kidnap you.
And so at the beginning, when people were so nice,
it was like, what?
It was very surprising.
But it was obvious that it was so genuine.
And being here now all this time,
that's just kind of a reflex of the culture.
And because of that, it just made it so much easier
to acclimate than I thought it would.
Creation's made it easier here for me.
And that was so nice.
It was part of what pulled me in.
Well, you mentioned getting your OIB
and all the paperwork stuff and the documents, which
is something everyone struggles with coming here.
And that leads me to expats in Croatia.
When did you start that and why?
What was the purpose behind it?
So I moved here in May 2012.
And I registered the domain in July of that same year.
So I knew I wanted to write something.
And I thought it'd be an interesting idea
to document my experience with the bureaucracy.
Because there were barely any resources if you just
wanted to travel in Croatia.
A lot of the tourist boards still had Croatian sites.
They didn't have anything in English.
So as I got an OIB, I wrote a post.
What an OIB is.
This is how you get your OIB.
And so as I went through procedures myself,
I started documenting that information
and then tried to find other topics that
would help anyone who wanted to live here after me.
And it was a blog for, I mean, it's always
got that blog element.
But it was just a blog that I did outside of my day job
for at least five years, I guess.
And at a certain point, I started
meeting some Croatians along the way here in Split
that would help me do research.
And then I got to a point here where
I had the opportunity to apply for permanent residence.
And when that happened, Mok said that I
had to have a Croatian salary.
So the only way to do that was to open up a company.
And so I was going to open up a company
and obligate myself to everything that that entails.
I wanted to make sure that it was a real company.
So that's when I thought about, OK,
can I actually turn expat and Croatian
into an actual functioning business that can pay my salary
and pay my contributions?
And I felt like it was.
And so I registered the company in 2018.
And now it is a business.
It took a couple of years to really get it on its feet.
But I brought on our first employee in 2020.
And now we have a total of 10 people, including me.
So that's essentially the timeline.
Wow.
So is that really when it started to blow up in 2020?
Did that coincide with more, I mean,
I'm going to say more tourists coming here.
But I guess that's not so much for tourists
as for people moving back here.
I'm just wondering why 2020?
I wonder, was there certain events?
I know the digital nomad visa was a little bit after that,
I think.
I'm not sure.
I'll let you talk about that.
Yeah.
The digital nomad permit came along in 2021.
So it was launched in March of 2021.
So this was a bit before that.
But there are factors.
There are a number of factors that created
this kind of perfect storm.
So one was, OK, so I had this company.
But I still was doing my day job of web development.
I had a web development business.
And it was going very well.
And because it was going very well,
I just didn't have the time to really invest
in building Expat in Croatia properly.
It was as I had time.
And I needed, I really just needed time.
And then the pandemic happened.
We had that first lockdown that was, oh, gosh,
I don't know what accent just came out of me.
That first April, March, April, and I was like, oh, my God.
I mean, I love going on long coffees.
But they do take up quite a bit of time.
So in March and April, we had this long extended lockdown
where I had no social commitments.
Nothing was happening.
So I could just work like an animal.
And there was no judgment from anybody.
And I finally got that dedicated time
where I could really map this out and figure out
how we were going to soar.
And then in combination with that,
you had all these people who, there
were people that were tourists in Croatia
that got stuck in Croatia.
And then because they got stuck in Croatia,
they were like, oh, my God, we want to live here.
And that happened.
And then also a byproduct of the pandemic
is you had all these people around the world
that at the same time got up and they were like,
we don't want to live this life anymore.
We want to go somewhere else.
We want to do something else.
And a lot of people wanted to come to Croatia.
And that was part of it.
And then in January 2020, the Croatian government
overhauled the Citizenship Act.
And I don't want to say they made it easier
to get citizenship.
That's not accurate.
But they changed the laws to open up citizenship
to more diaspora.
They removed the limit on how many generations back
you could go.
Spouses could get citizenship at the same time.
There are a few other things that they did to open it.
Oh, they waived the language test, the language
and history and culture test.
So that opened Croatia up to even more diaspora.
So all these things happened at the exact same time.
So we already had, at that point in 2020,
I'd already had the blog for seven years.
So there was already an audience built in.
There was already all this huge cache of content.
So when everyone started looking at Croatia,
we were ready for it.
And after that, it just happened really quick.
We hired a second person in 2021.
And then we hired three or four more that year.
And it just kept going.
The avalanche is still rolling down the hill.
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Yeah, well, you know, you reminded me of my own reason
for coming here, which was, I guess, 2021.
But also, you know, during COVID, during the lockdowns,
and I felt like I had always wanted to move
or at least come to Croatia for an extended period of time.
And at that point, it just felt like the perfect storm,
the perfect time.
Nothing else is going on.
Let's go to a different part of the world.
And then, yeah, now, so I've been here for two years
since then after thinking I was only
going to be here a few months, three, four months.
But what are some of the things that expats are struggling
with most here or things that you're helping people with most?
Well, that's a good question.
Well, OK.
I find that now that Croatia's been in the spotlight,
there are a lot of voices out there.
And the expat groups on Facebook have
become a huge hub for activity, for questions,
for fact finding.
Well, information finding, let's put it that way.
And because of that, it started to do a little bit
of a disservice, both to the people who
are coming to Croatia and also the bureaucracy itself.
There's this assumption or predisposition
to not trust the government, that they are never
on our side, that they can't do anything right,
that they're understaffed, that the people who are there
aren't trained, that they just got the job
because they have an uncle who works there,
or something like that.
And I'm not saying that that's not true in some ways.
But we've been working with the government
to get information for the last 10 years.
And we see that that's not an absolute.
We see that some of them do know what they're doing.
Some of them are genuinely trying to help you.
And some of them have limited resources.
And so one of the things that we're trying to achieve
is better educating the people who are coming into Croatia
so that they're more prepared when they go to the bureaucracy,
which makes it a whole lot easier for the bureaucracy
to handle whatever their request is.
Because you've got these two people coming
from completely different worlds that are speaking sometimes
not the same language, but not just the same language
in the sense of English versus Croatian,
but the same language in terms of the people from the outside
have a different perception of bureaucracy
and how it should work.
And then you have these people who
are working in Mokra and Croatia who've lived in Croatia
their entire lives.
And they've been dealing with the Croatian system.
So how do you make those two things work?
How can you achieve success?
And the way that you achieve success
is informing people as much as you possibly
can so that they go in there with a mind for success
and being humble and kind.
And then that results in a positive reaction
from the police.
And obviously not in all situations,
but in most situations.
And we've seen it.
We've had Mok tell us, we're thankful for your organization
because we have seen concretely how people are more prepared
and you are taking the burden off of us.
And that is what we are trying to achieve.
Make everything easier on the people that are coming.
The people are here trying to help them
because that is their look is their first point of entry
into Croatia.
So if they have a bad experience from that point,
it's going to mar everything else and everything
we want to do no matter what new project or post
that we want to execute or put out.
It's all with the mind of what can we
do to give back to Croatia, to help Croatia.
And the only way we can do that is that the people coming in
are assimilating, are loving Croatia the way
that we love Croatia.
So they're taking all of it in.
They're not coming in here and trashing it,
taking advantage of it, giving back.
We want people to give back.
We want people to cherish this place.
And so it starts from the very beginning
when they get the idea, oh, I want to come to Croatia.
We create resources so that we can take them
that entire length of like, OK, if you
want to come to Croatia, you start here.
And then you go to this step.
And these are all the things you need
to keep in mind along the way.
And OK, you've gotten your permit, great.
Here are ways that you can volunteer.
Here are ways that you can meet the Croatian community.
Here are ways that you can learn the language,
because without knowing any of the language at all,
it doesn't take very much Croatian for you
to get a Croatian to open up and welcome you into their world.
And you can't fully see why Croatia is so special
unless you are inside of the Croatian community.
So we try and go that entire lifecycle
so that everyone has the best experience possible.
And obviously, that's a big dream.
But we're trying to chip away at it a little bit at a time.
You know, that was an interesting perspective
you had on working with the government,
on that being a two-way street, making things easier,
both for the Croatian government and everyone working there
and doing the documents, as well as
for expats and people wanting their documents done.
Also, you mentioned the language just now.
And I wanted to ask, have you been learning Croatian at all?
Have you learned?
You've been here 11 years.
How is your Croatian going?
It is going to be a lifetime journey.
Excuse me.
I currently am with my fourth teacher.
I'm doing a teacher from the Croatian Language School
out of Zagreb in London and Mali Lusheen.
And I love it.
This is, by far, my best, my most favorite era
for learning Croatian.
I'm somewhere between B1 and B2.
I wish I was farther.
I've spoken very publicly about my struggles
learning Croatian.
I have a really hard time with it.
And I think part of that, I just don't
have a mind for second languages.
I just don't.
Not everyone does.
I think there's this assumption that we can just all do it.
And it's like, no, we all can't.
It's all about how everyone learns differently.
I have an uphill battle because I don't
have a Croatian partner.
I work in my home office predominantly.
I mean, speaking in English all day long for work.
But it's something that every single day of my life
I am dedicated to, every single day.
Every opportunity to speak Croatian,
to roll conversations in my head, to read it,
that's what I'm doing.
So it's going to be tough to get to fluency for me.
But I'm always working at it constantly
and always encouraging everyone to do anything
they can to learn as much Croatian as they possibly can.
I never say you've got to be fluent because that's not fair.
Not everyone can do that.
I mean, I don't have kids.
I can't imagine what it would be like to learn Croatian
if I had kids I had to take care of.
It's just me.
And I struggle to find that kind of concrete time
to sit down and dedicate to it.
But that's why you have to, if you want to learn any of it,
you can't just wait for that big block of time to do it.
You have to do these little things along the way.
I really like watching Netflix with Croatian subtitles.
It helps me kind of translate American English
into Croatian on some kind of level.
So you'll watch like a Hollywood movie
but with Croatian subtitles.
Yeah.
That's a good idea.
Yeah.
It's definitely a day by day sort of deal, like you said.
And it is a really difficult language, especially coming
from English, not a Slavic language background, which
makes it easier with the Pateži and the grammar
and everything and the constructions.
But yeah, it's definitely, for me, it's worthwhile, I think,
to learn and to study and to at least try.
And that's the most important thing.
Sarah, as we come down sort of to the end of the episode here,
I want to ask, what do you miss about Texas or about the US?
Or do you feel that life here in Croatia is lacking something?
Or are there ever times that you miss something?
Oh, I never really, no one's ever asked me the question,
do I feel like Croatia is lacking anything?
Yeah, I just said that off the top of my head,
but it sounded pretty intense, actually, after I said that.
Well, people ask me if I miss Texas a lot.
But it's interesting because I just had this trip,
and it was the most positive trip that I had.
And I won't go into the roots of why that is.
But there was a dynamic that kind of shifted for me
because there are some negative things for me
about going back home that really discouraged me
from doing that.
And those elements were kind of not there on this last trip.
So I was able to really enjoy my time there for the first time
ever.
And oh, I fell into Texas culture just, oh,
just head first.
I drank the Kool-Aid.
My accent came back.
I did the full Texas thing.
And that was really nice.
I felt like I missed Texas, actually,
for the first time since leaving.
And it wasn't like, oh, well, I've made a huge mistake.
It wasn't like that at all.
But it was really nice to be able to kind of remind
myself of the reasons why Texas is special,
because Texas is special.
It's a very different place than any other state
in the United States.
It was a country for nine years.
It was the only state that was its own country.
And because of that, we have a mentality
that it is its own country, just like Dalmatia has a mentality
like it's its own country.
De Provenic has a mentality like it's its own country,
because it was.
So those are things that I understand.
So what I'd say I miss, I do miss my friends.
I miss my family.
I miss the food quite a bit.
And one thing I didn't realize, I miss so much.
But I managed to be there at the right time.
We have wildflowers.
The state flower is this wildflower
called the blue bonnet.
And they're so, so beautiful.
And every child born in Texas has their photo
taken in an ocean of blue bonnets.
Everyone.
I have several of them that were taken.
And so when I was there was peak blue bonnet season.
And I did this day trip down to Austin
to get a document for Croatia.
And I saw this huge sea of them on the side of the highway.
And I was like, I said to my friend, we're pulling over.
I have to have my picture taken of blue bonnet.
So it's really nice.
I mean, I love Croatia.
And I don't feel like it's missing anything.
You know, at one time I felt like, oh, I
want to convince all of my friends to move here.
I want all my family to move here.
That way I can have everybody that I love
in the place that I love.
But there is something to be said for keeping
those worlds apart.
Because people may not fit in those other worlds.
And I know that when I go home to visit a lot of times,
I don't feel like I'm in the right place.
I feel a little bit like an alien.
But I think it's actually one benefit of having this life
is if I was living in Texas and had ready access to all
of my friends and family that I miss,
I don't know that we would all appreciate each other the way
that we would versus me going to visit there every two years.
Because then I have this really concentrated quality time
with them that I don't know that I otherwise
would have had.
So now I see kind of the silver linings
to those kinds of situations.
I don't know if I've answered your question or not.
I feel like I went on a tangent.
But I was just going to say that's a great answer
to a strongly worded question.
No apparent reason, an intense question.
No, it's food.
I love intense questions.
That's just the way it came off the top of my brain here.
As I'm still waking up here in the morning, it's already 10.
But you mentioned food, and Texas, of course,
has a great food culture.
And so does Croatia.
And before I ask about that, because that
will be our last question here, but I
want to give you a chance to shout out
your website and social media is where can people find you.
Can people find Expat in Croatia?
Sure.
So our website is expatincroasia.com.
And you can find us on all the big social medias.
Our handle is also expatincroasia.com.
It's pretty easy.
We have a newsletter that comes out on Tuesdays that
has all of our new posts, our updated posts,
a language lesson with audio that you
can hear from one of our Croatian team members.
And also we include actionable news from Croatian News
that we summarize in English.
So that way you know the things that are actually going on
there impact your daily life.
So that is how to find us.
Awesome, well thank you for that, Sarah.
And as we get ready to go here, I
want to ask you about food because of course Croatia also
has a great culture of food.
And Dalmesia in particular, where you are, you're in Split.
What are your favorite foods, favorite things
to eat here in Croatia?
Sure.
Paxicata is my top.
Love, love, love, love it.
And my favorite one is at the Krolo Winery near Cil.
It's amazing.
My wife makes it and it's just, it'll
blow my mind every single time I have it.
My second is San Eusia, so black risotto.
I love black risotto.
A buddy of mine, Michael Freer, him and I,
we switch off trying to find black risotto.
So he'll find one and then we'll go have lunch.
And then the next month I'll find one
and we'll go have lunch.
So we've been doing that for well over a year now.
I think we've done about 10 risottos.
So that for sure, I think there's
something else that kind of springs to mind.
I mean, I love gelato and I'm always
on the hunt for the best gelato place.
But I really enjoyed Croatian food quite a bit.
Oh, I'll tell you one more thing.
My favorite restaurant on the face of the planet
is in Istra called Starry Podes Room.
And I've been going there every year since the beginning.
And they're kind of like family now.
It's the highlight of my year.
I go in the fall.
But they have this dish that is an omelet,
so lightly scrambled eggs drizzled with olive oil
and then just covered in black truffles.
And I remember having it the first time and I was like,
how is this a thing that I get to eat that exists?
It just felt like so opulent, just so opulent.
But it's just an unbelievable combination of flavors.
And I just I look forward to having it every single year.
I love it.
Yeah, I'm going to have to write that down,
the name of that restaurant.
I'm not a big, I've never been a big mushroom or truffles fan.
But I've had the strukli with truffles here in Zagreb.
And that was my first time trying truffles.
And so I thought it was good.
So I've tried it.
That sounds good, an omelet with truffles.
Oh, it's good.
It's very nice.
I'll definitely have to try that.
Well, Sarah, thank you so much for coming here on the All
Things Croatia podcast.
I really appreciate what you're doing for the community,
for the expat community here in Croatia.
I'll drop links so everyone can click
on your website and your socials.
But really, thank you for taking the time
to come on the podcast here.
Well, thank you so much, Stanko.
It was a pleasure talking with you.
I appreciate the opportunity.
Thank you.