We Croats like to go to the Principality of Monaco. For starters, it’s a country much smaller than ours and there are not many of those around. When in Monaco, we immediately feel a bit bigger—there are four million of us and only four thousand of the real Monegasques. We beat them in every respect—well, not every. We go bigger than them in one more aspect. The dogs those people walk are much smaller than ours. While an average Croat lives with a German shepherd, a Labrador or a rottweiler (and if he or she were free to choose, they would prefer to have a wolf guarding the yard), the average inhabitant of the Côte d’Azur goes out for a stroll with a poodle in a winter coat or a pinscher in a miniature raincoat. I find this affinity for small dogs difficult to explain because to me a dog is something big that barks at me from the dark, a little bit like a subconscience.

What can also catch a Croat off-guard in Monaco, perhaps even more than small dogs, are sexy grandmothers. The abundance of sun-bed-tanned taut-skinned septuagenarians in miniskirts (pink and purple) with high heels and fur coats is simply not to be seen in Croatia. It’s not that we in Croatia prefer to grow old the natural way, it’s that the other way is a bit too expensive for us. At the antiques fair in Monaco, sexy grandmothers look for antique-style chairs (antique fairs are to Monegasques what football games are to us) and sit in each and every one they like while crossing their well-groomed legs. Many of them smile even when there’s nothing funny going on because of the slight tightness between the lips and the ears on which, like tiny chandeliers, earrings are suspended. A girl-friend who spends more time here than I do tells me that local men also have plastic operations performed on them, have false biceps and the like put in, and that no chest or behind on the Côte d’Azur is really authentic.