“I MISSED THAT FEELING”: Srdjan returned to Serbia After 17 years living abroad, shares his experience! (VIDEO)

Srđan left Serbia and went to Australia with his family in the 1990s, when he was still a teenager. He spent 17 years there, after which he moved to the United Kingdom, and then decided to return to Serbia, where he has been living for ten years now. He shared his life story, the challenges of adjustment, and what means the most to him today on the YouTube channel “Attic Life.”

Coming to Australia was a culture shock.

“It took me three years to get used to this new paradigm,” Srđan said, recalling the differences in mentality, climate, and nature.

He particularly remembers his first surprise with a school friend who asked him for money to burn a game onto a CD: “I was shocked. I thought – if you’re my friend, you won’t charge me.”

Life in Australia

Australian nature and exotic animals were completely foreign to him.

“Once I heard a sound outside the house and saw a wallaby, a small kangaroo. I wanted to go out, and it just hopped away and disappeared into the forest,” he said.

Although Australia was new and interesting, what he missed most was snow.

“It sounds strange, but it’s snow… Christmas is celebrated in the summer, and I missed that feeling when you wake up and everything is white,” he pointed out.

A Child from Former Yugoslavia

As a child from former Yugoslavia, he encountered prejudices in Australia and the United Kingdom.

“One strange woman… she shouted: ‘Why don’t you go back to Croatia?’ She didn’t even know where we were from,” he said.

People, he says, often automatically associated Serbia with wars and Milošević. That’s why he long presented himself as a Yugoslav, and as he says, “Yugoslav doesn’t have a nationalistic connotation; everything is put on the same level.”

On Returning to Serbia

Srđan tried to maintain a connection with his native language.

“At home, I mostly spoke Serbian with my mother. Later, my grandmother joined us… although she understood English, she pretended not to,” he recalls. Although he mixed languages in his speech in his youth, he wanted Serbian to remain part of his identity.

Upon returning to Serbia, he experienced a new kind of adjustment.

“When I was visiting, they treated me like a foreigner. When I moved, that status disappeared. Drivers in Serbia… I get the impression they don’t know about turn signals. I walk, I ride a bike, everything is close,” he said. Traffic culture particularly bothers him.

“Serbian Australian”

Today, he doesn’t miss Australia – the crowds, the traffic, the stress – and what bothered him most about London was the lack of spontaneous social contacts.

“In London, you see friends in three months. Here, if you don’t see each other for three months, your friends would think something is wrong. Here, in Serbia, I learned the importance of small things. It’s not about being lazy, but about knowing how to enjoy small things,” he emphasized.

He concludes that there is no ideal place, but the right people make a difference.

“The most important thing is to live in the moment. That’s what staying here taught me – to appreciate the present. Now I am somewhere between a Serb and an Australian. In fact, I also feel like a Yugoslav… I live between three worlds, and one of them no longer exists,” Srđan said at the end.