Croatian girl in uk

So, I moved to UK in September 2019 because of university and tbh it's pretty big deal for one 19 year old girl who never lived alone so I decided to tell you a little bit about it.

I'm from Croatia, it is a small Mediterranean country near Italy. My hometown is Rijeka (it means river) and it's placed on the coast so I was used to looking at the sea every day. That was probably the biggest geographical difference between Nottingham and Rijeka. Weather is slightly different, winters are colder and summers hotter than they are in UK, but that's actually good thing cause I won't be in UK during summer hehe.

You are probably wondering why I decided to go to UK and not some other country in Europe and how I found this course. When I started high school ( I went to grammar school and I had 16 subjects so I was prepared to go to whichever uni I want to) I wanted to study medicine later and honestly that's probably something I will always love but it would have killed me to have 12 hour shifts and going to uni till I'm 30. Then I decided to do a little research what courses do we have in Croatia. There were few courses like archaeology and art history that I found really interesting but unfortunately when you get those degrees in Croatia you can only work in museums and that's not something I wanted to do. Fashion industry in Croatia is not impressive and we have terrible fashion courses so I haven't even thought about doing fashion. My parents were against me going somewhere else than Croatia to study but I decided to research a little bit and I found great fashion course in Paris but I don't speak French that good so UK and USA were only options left. UK is much closer and I always loooooved the accent (and 1D) so after few days I decided to either study Fashion communication and promotion or Film, media and TV. It took me 4 months to convince my parents to event think about me going away from home (plus they are still hoping that I will drop out and come back home). They finally gave up and I ended up at NTU happier than ever studying FCP even though I wasn't quite sure what is it exactly.

My life has completely changed when I came here. I live in a house with two Croatian housemates I haven't met before. It was difficult to get used to living with strangers but it's okay now. I have a job so I could pay for my rent and food because salaries in Croatia are not as good as they're in UK and I don't want my parents to pay for everything. It's really nice to live alone, I have my piece and there's no queue for bathroom lol. I miss my friends and my big family a lot but I miss my dog even more (look at the picture she is so cute). People here are not as kind and open as they are on Balkan and I kinda feel sorry for them because they don't know how nice it is. Maybe I can bring a little bit of that to UK who knows?

It was extra weird to go to country that's 2000km away from your home, where they don't speak your language and where you don't know a single person while you are aware that you are not going to move back to Croatia any time soon, maybe never. It's gonna be extra weird to wait 2 more months to go back home but I'm kinda excited because I don't know what is waiting for me in Nottingham.