Maria Randall stood in a Croatian supermarket, hungry, lost and crying, while a man shouted at her in a language she didn’t understand.
She’d been in the country a matter of days.
The 54-year-old had just swapped London for the seaside town of Podstrana, near Split, with her husband and dog.
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The plan was sunshine and a fresh start. The reality arrived faster than she expected, and it wasn’t glamorous.
“I was exhausted,” she told CreatorZine.
“People imagine moving abroad is exciting and glamorous, but I felt strangely numb. Everything had happened so quickly that I had barely had time to process it.
I was excited, scared and wondering whether I had completely lost my mind.”
The whole thing started with a three-day holiday. It ended with a one-way flight in July 2023.
The cereal bar incident
That early supermarket trip went wrong the moment Google Maps stopped working.
By the time Maria found the shop, she was already overwhelmed. Nothing on the shelves looked familiar.
“I did not recognise any of the products,” she said.
“Something as simple as buying food suddenly felt difficult.”
So she grabbed a cereal bar and started eating while she walked around.
A man began shouting at her. She burst into tears.
“Later I realised he worked for the supermarket and probably thought I was trying to steal the cereal bar before paying for it.
Looking back now it is funny. At the time I wanted to get on a plane and go home.”
The volume took some getting used to. Coming from Britain, Maria read every raised voice as a row.
“I genuinely thought people were arguing all the time. It took me a while to realise that what sounded aggressive to me was often just a normal conversation.”
The part nobody photographs
Then her dog died, shortly after the move, while everything still felt unsettled.
Over the next 18 months she lost both her mother and her younger brother.
“Nobody really talks about that side of living abroad,” she said.
“People see the sea, the sunshine and the photographs, but they do not see what it feels like when major family events happen hundreds of miles away.”
There was a hospital stay too. Maria is severely lactose intolerant, and a dairy contamination landed her in an ambulance she could barely follow.
“It was one of the most frightening experiences I have had since moving here.”
A boat, a website, a Croatian son
Things turned slowly. She learned the culture, made friends, many of them fellow expats who knew exactly what starting over felt like.
And then, almost by accident, she ended up running a business.
“It started as a conversation, then somehow I had a boat, then a website, then a skipper, then our first guest.”
Island Discovery now runs boat tours along the Croatian coastline.
Her skipper, Pasko, turned out to be someone she’d met on one of her first trips after arriving.
She asked him to join the day she launched. “Today I joke that he is my Croatian son.”
The Adriatic is the reason she stayed. “The colour of the water still amazes me and some mornings when I am walking my Jack Russell, Sid, along the coastline I spot dolphins in the distance. Those moments never get old.”
She still misses home. Specifically Wagamama and a proper Chinese takeaway.
Everything else, Croatia now covers.
Why It Matters
Maria’s story is the counterweight to a genre that sells relentlessly well: the expat dream.
Creators across Instagram and TikTok have built entire followings on the villa, the sea view, the escape.
Maria built a business on the same coastline, but she talks about the grief, the hospital and the crying in the cereal aisle.
That honesty is increasingly what audiences reward, and increasingly what the polished version leaves out.
She’s also blunt about the economics. Coastal rents have climbed sharply, food and restaurant prices now sit close to UK levels, and construction is everywhere.
“Personally, I think Croatia has changed significantly since joining the EU and later adopting the euro.”
The broader picture is a Mediterranean coastline being reshaped by exactly the kind of arrivals Maria represents, and priced accordingly.
What’s changing isn’t only who moves there. It’s what it costs to stay.
As for what she’d tell the woman boarding that Croatia Airlines flight in 2023:
“Buckle up, it will be one hell of a ride.”
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