Finding home in a foreign tongue

From Wyoming mornings to Adriatic afternoons

At 6 a.m. in Cheyenne, Wyoming, while most of the city sleeps, Billie is wide awake, immersed in Croatian syntax and vocabulary. The attorney’s morning routine might seem peculiar – his weekly language lessons scheduled before dawn – but to Billie, it’s simply the price of passion. Four days earlier, he was dining seaside in Split; today he’s braving temperatures of -20°C, his life straddling two worlds 5,000 miles apart.

“We’ve had so many people come to us and say, ‘We want to go to Croatia. What do you recommend?’” Billie says, his enthusiasm evident even through the early hour. What began as an unexpected connection during a 1996 NATO deployment to Bosnia has evolved into a deep, abiding love for a country, culture, and language that he had no prior ties to – a rare and remarkable trajectory for a language learner.

Roots of a twenty-year romance

It started with translators in Bosnia who helped Billie learn rudimentary Serbian and Croatian while working in both communities. The experience planted a seed that remained dormant for over twenty years until 2018, when Billie and his wife, also an attorney, decided to visit Croatia for their anniversary. A week in Dubrovnik, including day trips to Split and Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina, reignited his interest in the language.

Building bridges through basketball

Serendipity stepped in when they returned home to discover a basketball player from Mostar attending their local junior college. Billie began speaking with him in Croatian, dusting off language books from decades earlier. This connection blossomed into friendship – the young man spent Christmas breaks with them, becoming “part of our family.” Through him, Billie met other Croatian and Bosnian athletes studying in the region, creating a small network that kept the language alive in his daily life.

Realizing that self-study could only take him so far, Billie found Let’s Learn Croatian online. “Other than moving to Croatia and living there full time, there’s no way you’re going to learn it unless you have a program like this,” he explains. The structured approach – weekly lessons, targeted vocabulary, and consistent practice – accelerated his progress dramatically.

Moments of breakthrough and belonging

The breakthrough moment came in Petročane, a small tourist village north of Zadar. Billie walked into the local post office, intent on mailing a children’s book to his teacher’s son. Though he began by asking in Croatian if the clerk spoke English, he completed the entire transaction – buying an envelope, addressing it, purchasing postage – in Croatian. When the clerk asked why he’d inquired about English when his Croatian was perfectly fine, Billie felt a surge of accomplishment that validated years of 6 a.m. lessons.

These small victories accumulated. In Dubrovnik, a waiter was so impressed by Billie’s Croatian that he assumed he must have been born there or have Croatian parents. When Billie explained he had no connection to Croatia beyond admiration, the conversation shifted to Croatian music and culture. “This could have been the worst food in the world,” his wife remarked afterward, “but this will always be your favourite restaurant because of the things the waiter said.”

From vacation to second home

In 2022, Billie and his wife took their relationship with Croatia to the next level, purchasing an apartment 15 kilometres north of Zadar. What had been occasional tourism became a second home – a place to return to, to build connections, to belong. Their morning walks now include stops at the local pekara for burek and strudel, conversations with neighbours, and the simple pleasure of daily life by the Adriatic.

Beyond language, Billie has embraced Croatian culture wholeheartedly. He follows local basketball teams, has visited stadiums in Zagreb, Zadar, and Šibenik, and often attends games when visiting. He’s learned to cook cevapi, moussaka, and paprika, bringing flavors of Croatia to Wyoming. Each December, he and his wife experience Advent in Zagreb, which he describes as unlike anything in America, even New York’s famous Rockefeller Center.

A future between two worlds

Though his legal career keeps him in Wyoming for now, retirement promises new possibilities. “When we retire, we hope to spend half the year in Croatia,” Billie says, envisioning mornings by the sea rather than in the shadow of the Rockies. Until then, each weekly lesson, each basketball game conversation, each message exchanged with Croatian friends bridges the distance between his two worlds.

For Billie, Croatian isn’t just a set of grammar rules or vocabulary lists – it’s the key that unlocked a second home, a parallel life, and connections that transcend linguistic barriers. His journey from NATO soldier to Croatian property owner, from beginner to someone who can sustain hours of conversation, demonstrates how language learning, when fueled by genuine passion, becomes far more than an academic exercise. It becomes a way of belonging.