Hello everyone! My name is Andrej and I’m writing this to you from Zagreb, the capital city of Croatia, a small country in the south of Europe. I am 29 years old and I was born and raised in San Diego, California, which is about as far away as you can get from New York in the continental U.S. Although I grew up far away from where you are now, we both share the experience of living in coastal cities. My parents immigrated from a country named Yugoslavia right as it disintegrated in a series of wars and turned into several new countries (seven or six depending on who you ask!). One of those new countries is Croatia, and I learned how to speak Croatian at home. Although the neighborhood that I grew up in had a lot of immigrants in it, Croatia is such a small country that the only people I knew who spoke Croatian were my family, so in some ways, it was like knowing a secret code.
When I was going to school, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for a long time, but there were several subjects that interested me including science, history and economics. I knew that I wanted a challenge, so I decided to study chemistry in college, but after I had finished my degree and worked in a biotech lab for a while making new medicines, I decided I wanted to try to become a historian.
