Split probably grew on me the most of the cities I’ve visited so far. My first impression, that Split is a summer resort town overrun with tourists, isn’t unjustified. But a lot of the people strutting their stuff on the Riva and drinking in the many outdoor restaurants are locals. And partially this impression is my own fault for staying so close to Diocletian’s palace. Here’s how my ratings shake out:

• Rent: 6.4. The average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Split’s city center is $430.09. Not bad. Not bad at all. For a little more than that, I bet I could find an apartment within Diocletian’s palace. Living like an emperor.
• Walkability: 8. A very compact urban core that’s almost entirely pedestrianized? Again, sounds great. In my explorations outside Diocletian’s palace and the Old Town, however, things weren’t always quite so ideal. On 25 May, I went for a hike in Split’s hilly Marjan Peninsula, just a stone’s throw from the Old City. The walk up to the hill’s highest and most scenic point is pedestrian-only, but to explore other parts of the small peninsula, I found myself walking along winding roads, many with no sidewalk and no shoulder.
  

  I don’t expect to encounter any cars here (25 May 2018).

  

  And looking back behind me, no cars there either (25 May 2018).

• Dating: 9. I enjoyed my people-watching on the Riva in large part because it was a continuous parade of some of the hottest women I’ve ever seen. The T&A here is incredible. And no, my Washington, D.C. friends, I am not referring here to “time & attendance.”
• Food: 4. I’ve come to expect that eating a meal at a scenic outdoor table in a touristy area of a city will be pricey. But in Split, it’s over the top. A hamburger and fries at one of those restaurants along the Riva or inside Diocletian’s palace costs $15. If you want pasta or any sort of fish, that’s over $20. A cheap beer (in a big huge half-liter beer stein, but still) costs $7 or $8. I wanted to try some of the local specialties, but the cost was prohibitive. So I ate mostly take-away pizza (not bad — Split used to be ruled from Venice, after all), hamburgers, and french fries. And supermarkets, my savior in Iberia, aren’t as great a deal here either. No $1.50 bottles of decent wine here. No. The bottle of white wine I bought for $3 smelled like pubic hair and tasted like gasoline. (I still drank down the entire bottle though; waste not, want not.) The product of one of the old communist wineries, is my guess. (The $7 bottle of Croatian rum I bought, though, was surprisingly not terrible. Not good, but not terrible.) Although not all of the communist-era beverages are awful. Cockta, the Warsaw Pact’s answer to Coca-Cola, is still around and I think it’s actually tastier than Coke. It always tastes a little flat, but it’s got this sweet bubble-gum-like flavor to it that I like. Come to think of it, it tastes just like Inca Kola, a bright yellow soda sold in the Latino foods aisle of Washington, D.C.-area supermarkets that my former Peruvian roommate introduced me to. But Cockta, thankfully, is the usual dark brown cola color.
  

  I think they’ve upgraded the packaging since the Berlin Wall fell (24 May 2018).

• Ambience: 8. It’s hard to top drinking a beer on the steps of a Roman emperor’s palace, or on a sunny promenade overlooking the Adriatic. And Split’s got medieval charm in spades. Outside of the touristy part of town, there are, admittedly, some low-slung, expansive, ponderous communist-era (I assume) gray monoliths, abandoned or mostly abandoned and sprouting weeds and graffiti.
  

  I had to buy a 50-kuna ($7.89) beer to sit on one of these red cushions and enjoy this scene. It was almost worth it (28 May 2018).

  

  A lion and some human figures guard Diocletian’s mausoleum (25 May 2018).

  

  I think this building was a Cold War-era sports complex, and there’s still a gym in part of it. Most of it, though, appears abandoned (26 May 2018).

• Transit: 6. As in Porto, I was able to walk everywhere, so I didn’t test the transit system. There’s no metro here, but there are plenty of city buses.
• Health care: 5.0. I don’t have health care data for Split, so I’m plugging in Zagreb’s number.
• Nature: 8. Did I mention there’s this lovely, forested, hilly peninsula called Marjan just steps from Split’s Old City, and it’s laced with hiking trails?
  

  There are a lot of cacti in Split for some reason. And little green lizards. Unfortunately the latter were always too quick for me to photograph. Not so the former. They always posed nice and still for me (25 May 2018).

  

  In Split, even many of the seemingly inaccessible natural features show the hand of civilization. And also notice the mountain climber at top left (25 May 2018).

  

  And you don’t need to go to the Marjan Peninsula to see some unusual wild critters. These are apparently wild (feral?) peacocks, hopping from roof to roof along a lane near my apartment (29 May 2018).

• Internet: 7.
• Crime: 6.6.
• Language: 4. Croatian is an unfamiliar Slavic language that I think would be difficult for me to pick up. But it is written in the Latin alphabet. And many people, particularly the young, speak English very passably.
• Bikeability: 5. I didn’t test this one myself either. I didn’t see any dedicated bike lanes here, nor did I see a city bike-share program. But there are plenty of tourist bicycle rental shacks along the tourist strip near the Riva, and I saw a number of more serious cyclists pedaling up and down the steep hills of the Marjan Peninsula.
  

  The cyclist at the lower left is negotiating one of the Marjan Peninsula’s many hairpin turns (25 May 2018).

• Friendliness: 5. I had heard before coming here that the Croats are a bit standoffish. Could be those years of civil war and “ethnic cleansing” in the early 1990s left them a little less than trusting of strangers. But that wasn’t my impression. At least the people I interacted with, most of whom work in the tourist industry in one way or another, were perfectly nice. It wasn’t like everyone was perma-frowning like most Russians I’ve met.
• Pollution: 7.2.