Croatia is one of the easiest countries in the world to fall in love with in July and one of the hardest to think clearly about while you’re doing it. You see Split from the water, or Dubrovnik at golden hour, or an island you can’t pronounce from the deck of a boat, and something in your Canadian brain starts running the numbers on a life there. The problem is that the Croatia you’re falling for is a four-month performance. The Croatia you would actually live in is Zagreb in February, a ferry timetable that thins out in November, a police station where nobody is in a hurry, and a coastal town that is genuinely lovely and genuinely empty for half the year.

This is the next entry in the Expat Living for Canadians series, and Croatia forced the series to grow a new category. Japan was about functionality against integration. Portugal was about whether the lifestyle survives the disappearance of the bargain. Greece was about a country unusually good at consuming foreign income and unusually weak at generating local income. Croatia is about something else entirely, and after working through the immigration law, the tax code, the treaty and the healthcare system, here is the sentence I kept arriving at:

Croatia is the easiest country in this series to move into for a while and one of the hardest to stay in for good, and it has quietly repriced itself as though permanence were easy.