I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when I tried to pay the taxi driver in kunas that I'd carefully saved from a trip to Zagreb in 2017, only to remember Croatia joined the euro two years ago. The poor man, Ante, just laughed and said, "British? You always bring old money. My grandfather still has Yugoslav dinars in his sock drawer." He drove me the rest of the way to the Makarska Brela clutching his stomach, genuinely wheezing with laughter.

The property sits on that glorious stretch of Central Dalmatian Riviera where the Biokovo mountains loom over you like a grumpy relative at a wedding, beautiful but slightly judgemental. I was still flustered from my currency debacle when I met Marija, who manages the place. She took one look at my crumpled euros and said, "Ante called. Everyone knows now." So much for anonymity.

Marija is one of those people who tells you exactly what you need to hear, whether you want to or not. Within five minutes she'd established I was single, overpacked, and apparently walking wrong. "You stomp," she observed, handing me keys. "This is mountain country. We walk soft, like we might disturb a goat." She then demonstrated, floating across the terrace in flip-flops, while I followed like a confused bear.

That first evening I ventured to the nearest konoba, mostly because Marija had phoned ahead to tell them I was coming. The owner, Duje, greeted me with a rakija that nearly stripped my throat lining. "Marija says you need feeding properly," he announced, as if this were a medical intervention. His wife, Katarina, emerged from the kitchen to inspect me, wiping her hands on an apron that had probably seen three decades of service. "Too thin," she declared, though I've been called many things and that isn't one of them. She returned with prsut that she'd cured herself, and proceeded to tell me about every pig involved, by name.

A man at the corner table, introduced simply as "the professor" though nobody specified in what, insisted on translating Katarina's dialect into something he considered proper Croatian, which she found hilarious. "He was a geography teacher in Split for twelve years," she confided loudly, "and now he thinks he owns language." The professor raised his glass to me, entirely unbothered, and began explaining why the mountain wind patterns made this particular village superior to Brela proper. I understood perhaps forty percent but nodded enthusiastically, which he took as agreement and bought me another rakija.

By the third glass I found myself in genuine conversation with an elderly woman named Nada who'd wandered in with her own chair, apparently a regular occurrence. She spoke no English, I speak barely any Croatian, yet we spent twenty minutes discussing what I eventually realised was her passionate opinion about proper tomato cultivation. Something about afternoon shade and singing to them. Duje translated fragments, mostly accurately, occasionally not, depending on whether he agreed with her.

Walking back to the property that night, slightly rakija-wobbly and carrying leftover bread Katarina had refused to let me refuse, I passed Marija watering her geraniums. She didn't look up but said, "You talked to Nada. Good. She doesn't talk to most people." I asked why me. Marija shrugged. "You walk loud. She likes knowing where people are."

I stood there on that dark coastal road, mountains invisible above me, sea murmuring below, feeling unexpectedly seen by strangers who'd already mapped my flaws and decided to feed me anyway. That's the thing about arriving somewhere properly, I suppose. You come with your wrong money and your heavy footsteps, and somehow people find a place for you regardless. I walked the rest of the way softer, or tried to, though I suspect I still sounded like that bear.