What follows is a description of travel to California from Balkanian perspective.

Although I complain a lot, I still consider the United States one of the best countries in the world and I highly admire the American spirit for its endless imagination for innovation and its infectious optimism visible in every American that I’ve been fortunate enough to meet.

LAX. Finally! We have survived the 11-hour sit-up in a tubular piece of metal with a large crowd that included two babies singing their louder than jet engine noise symphonies in a perfect antiphase which guaranteed no sleep on my end. 

The first surprising thing after the landing is how familiar everything looked: the traffic lights, the signs, the red blinkers. It all reminded me of countless movies and games, almost made me feel like we were in a movie or a game. 

We caught one of the many buses to the closest rent-a-car and then joined the thirty minute queue. Rent-a-car is a big business here, it seems, since their lot had hundreds of cars and a lot of people coming here straight from the airport. And this was just one of the many rent-a-cars near the airport.

We got a bumped-up car, took a video of it so that the rental company couldn’t screw with us later, and took the four lane highway, with surprisingly mediocre road quality. And then. Teslas. Teslas everywhere. And pickups. Seems like these two represent 50% of the cars here. The highway is different from the ones in Europe, there are a lot more exits and the speed limit is only around 105kmh most of the time. We spent a lot of time driving to and from LA, so we got used to the traffic jams.

And then. The stop sign! What is this? Wait a minute. Can’t be. People literally stop all the way on the stop sign. When we saw the “STOP AHEAD” written on the road, at first we laughed because it was weird that there’s an announcement. But then we realized that stop signs are serious business here. In Croatia, although these signs look exactly the same, no one takes them seriously. Croatian sign: “STOP”. Translation in Croatian heads: “slow down a bit if it’s not too much of a hassle”.

And everyone keeps their distance while driving. No one will be on your rear bumper if you go only 10kmh over the limit, even when you drive on a narrow windy road through the hills. In Croatia, we would probably have a BMW breathing down our necks after the first kilometer of that road. We heard maybe a couple of honks during our entire trip, which is also a little surprising since LA is much bigger than Zagreb.

One of the things that gave us a little heart attack were traffic spikes when exiting the traffic lot. We didn’t know that they only destroy tires in one direction, so losing our traffic spike virginity was pretty stressful for us.

The best thing from LA is the endless beach. The bike ride through it was amazing and it’s worth paying the expensive Lyft bikes to experience it [$34 for a 1-hour ride (if I knew that it was that expensive I would pedal like crazy)]. Other than that, I was left unimpressed by LA. I’m not a fan of big cities. There is no city center and we had to drive everywhere. The city itself is pretty dirty and has a certain smell.

One of the surprising things is how bad fast food is. In-N-Out Burger is hyped for some reason, but the burger is no better than in any cheap fast food here in Croatia. I’ll never forget a Taco Bell that literally smelled like piss and served no drinks, where a homeless woman was arguing about something with the cashiers.

The non-fast-food-chain food is mostly okay though. As Balkanians we opted for the cheapest restaurant options, of course. So I can’t really give a good review of restaurants. The fact that we got steaks that were as tasty as shoe soles is probably due to the fact we only went to the cheapest restaurants and not a good representation of food in LA. We did attempt to try some great Mexican food, though. I wrote “attempt” because when we arrived at the address of one famous Mexican restaurant, we found an ordinary house and people waiting for the food on the front door, so we opted for these tasty soles… ehm, sorry.. I meant steaks.

One of my biggest expenses from the trip is Starbucks. I’ve drank rivers of Americano and I think I’ve eaten more brownies on this trip than I did my entire life before the trip. The annoying thing about Starbucks is how they ask for a name and since I am Hrvoje, instead of going through the struggle of spelling the name every time and then gambling if I’ll understand their pronunciation later, I’ve decided to go by a fake English name. This was all going well up until the point when one cashier said: “Really? That’s my name!”. There’s a saying in Croatia for this type of situation: “Earth, open yourself!”.

The other annoying thing about Starbucks is that they have three tables where you could probably fit thirty. They want you to grab your one liter Americano and jog the fuck away with it. Rumor has it that’s the main reason they didn’t open shop here in Zagreb. They figured out that we like spending hours sitting and patiently drinking our coffee while complaining about anything and everything to our friends.

Oh, and Starbucks is one of the not-too-many places that accepts Apple Pay, which blew my mind. California, the place where Apple Pay was literally invented, has a lower percentage of places accepting it than Croatia, which is sad. Tap-to-pay is more an exception than a rule here, where in Croatia you can tap-to-pay in any place that accepts credit cards nowadays.

Okay, I think that’s enough ranting about LA, so let’s switch to San Francisco. And ranting about it, of course.

Like how snowdrops are the signs that spring is near, papers taped to the back window saying “nothing in the car” on the highway cars are the signs that San Francisco is near. The first stop was the Golden Gate Bridge, where we saw a “frequent break-ins” sign warning us to not leave anything in the car. Upon returning from the vista that is 5 minutes of walking distance we saw a car with a smashed window next to ours. So I guess the sign should stay there. Maybe they should even — and I know how insane this sounds — add a camera.

Weather in San Francisco was pure perfection. While it was 40C (104F) in LA at the time, it was only around 24C (75F) in SF. And it’s chilly in the evenings and mornings. Absolute perfection.

The city feels like a classical American city much more than LA. High-rises everywhere, narrow streets that rarely see any sunlight, and really steep streets. I’ve heard about the steepness of SF, but it really surprised me even after knowing about it. And there are signs telling people to park at 90 degrees on these steep streets. I feel sorry for them.

The cable car runs through the city and adds a special charm to it. It’s lovely that they have preserved it, so you get a feeling like you are in the 19th century while riding in it. I loved hearing it ring and roll up the hill in the distance. You can’t just hop on wherever if you want to ride, though.

The entire city looked much, much better than expected, thanks to Twitter which really put the bar low. We didn’t use the car in the city, so I loved walking around and exploring. As we were exploring I went to the most famous bookstore in the city - “City Lights” hoping I could find a good classic book there, but was a little disappointed with their selection. Most of their books are either pop-fiction or pop-non-fiction, so I had a very hard time finding some good classic books, but I did find a selection of short stories from Chekov.

I loved the piers, the huge park in the middle of the city and big botanical garden trees. Coyote warning sign inside the botanical garden is also one of my favorites.

Although the stereotype for people in California is that they are rude we had the exact opposite experience. Everyone was maybe even too polite for our Balkanian tastes. We are used to service workers being really disinterested in providing better service. So it’s weird how every worker we encountered asked us how we are doing and started a little chit-chat with us. This even went a little too far for my taste when a woman in a clothing shop started asking if I was the tallest person in my family.

I think the difference in worker behavior is due to how tips work, so the workers are really incentivized to be super polite in order to get a big tip. In Croatia, no matter if you talk to every customer or you opt for talking to every colleague instead, you get paid the same. The only exceptions are bars and restaurants, but even there tips usually don’t represent the majority of salary.

As with any traveling abroad, this trip has made me better understand the box that I’m living in, made me understand some of the differences between living in Europe vs the States. It made me realize that not everything is perfect across the pond and that despite all the bad things that we have in Croatia I’m still lucky for being born here.