At one of the pre-remote webinars, a person said: You have never been so busy as you will be on remote year. It has only been one week, and yuppers. Below, I put in headers so you can skip to what you most want to know about my life in Remote Year.
Work
My biggest concern coming into remote year was if traveling / new environments would get in the way of my job. I love my job, my team and want to continue with them. Luckily, there are many who feel the same way and so the workspace is filled with concentrated, hard-working colleagues … who then stop working at some point 🙂
Fellow Travelers
Meeting 48 new people in one week was sometimes a little daunting, but, I have a whole year. I had the luck to live this first month with an amazing woman who is a CrossFit level 1 trainer and olympic weight lifting coach, but most importantly, a confident, authentic woman who loves to party. We cook very similarly and she also loves my omelettes 🙂 To be honest, when I first saw that I was paired with a CrossFitter who is from Long Island, I thought: But I am traveling to get away from the norm … Nope, Kristi isn’t the norm 😀
Food
The cuisine here so far is a wonderful mix of Oma’s cooking and Mediterranean and Italien and … maybe I should just say, Croatian food is super yummy. Highlights of this week include: fish soup with Robert and Danny (who is a work colleague of one of my best friends from middle school, the world is tiny!)
Stuffed cabbage at a Konoba – which is a traditional Croatian restaurant. Luckily, Sanam is a foodie and searches out where the best places to eat are. We have decided to follow her around and order whatever she orders!
At Konoba Fife, Split:
Home
This month, I am living 2 blocks from the beach, which is populated by many beach bars. Turns out, it is cheaper for the owners to “illegally” put a beach bar by the beach and pay fines than to pay the taxes / zoning laws and be there legally. Come October 20, the local gov’t has said there will be a crack down and they must all close … Glad we are here now, before that happens! (In each city, there is a local team. One person on that team tells us about the area and teaches us some of the local language. Croatian is super duper hard, but I am trying! Helena, our local guide, is a journalist.).
View from apartment and panorama of beach:
The City
The walk from our home / work place is about 30 minutes along the shore. Here are some views:
The “old city” is a walled area with small, narrow streets that for a person used to a grid from NYC almost impossible to navigate – making it wonderful to explore. The typical local spends the weekend having a coffee in a cafe for hours, watching the people go by, chatting with people they know, enjoying the weather. My goal for Split is to spend a few weekend days “being local.” I will have to be careful to get out again, though. On one of the first nights, we found that they close the gates early in the night!
Side Trips
Sunday we spent in the lake region,
Plitvice Lakes National Park. It is about a 3 hour drive from Split and was absolutely packed! Turns out, yesterday was Independence Day for Croatia and a lot of families went to the National Park. Kind of like how I imagine Yosemite during the on-season.
