Last month my landlord called me and told me that I had to move out because he was going to sell the apartment I live in.
In a way, this came as a blessing. I wanted to move out of that place by the end of the year either way. But at the time I had no clue what hellscape finding an apartment in Zagreb had become since I last moved. This is a cautionary tale of what to look out for and what to avoid when renting in Zagreb.
I immediately started looking for a new place on Njuskalo (a local classified ads site).
The first thing I noticed was that rent has gone up by about 25%. I read about that in the news, so that didn’t surprise me too much. But what the news articles didn’t say is that for 3 bedroom apartments the price went up by 100% or more, which sucks because I always go for a 3 bedroom apartment so that I can have an office. Having the ability to clearly separate my work and my life environment is important to me.
After some searching I found a few reasonably priced apartments and arranged to go see them.

Chapter 1: Paradigms & Marketing

Seems like in the years since my last move most landlords took a philosophy course and decided to tackle the age old question of “What is the ground floor of a building anyway?”.
The first apartment I went to see was supposed to be on the ground floor of a small two story building. But upon entering the building – from the street – the real estate agent took me down a stairwell to a floor with a single door, opened it, and we stepped into the apartment.
“Very weird ground floor” I told him, “It’s almost 3 meters underground”. The real estate agent responded without hesitation with a happy but somewhat hostile sounding tone “Depends on what you consider the ground floor to be. This apartment is on the ground, and it has windows to the outside which are at waist height, it even has an exit to the garden. By all means this is the ground floor.”
I wasn’t in the mood to discuss paradigms like Physics professors defending the foundation of their lives work at some conference, so I sad my goodbyes and left. 
Little did I know that this would just be the first in a series of apartments that were on the ground floor while at the same time at least one stairwell below the entrance and 1+ meters underground.
There were two camps of people; one believes that the ground floor is what’s at the main entrance and everything above or below that is either + or – 1 floor, while the other camp believes that the ground floor is everything that touches the ground.
I am a firm believer in the ground floor is at the main entrance, but I was thrown into some bizarre world out of Kafka’s fever dreams and just didn’t know it yet.
How could a fundamental fact like this be subject to relative interpretation? I tried to see the the other camp’s perspective – to understand their paradigm – but no matter how I sliced it this was just complete madness. 
If everything that touches the ground is the ground floor then some buildings would have two ground floors or more – one on the street level and another in the basement – which made no sense at all. How would you explain to someone where you live? 
How would someone know by looking from the street how many stories the building had, or even if they entered it? There would have to be a label on the building that warned visitors that there were more stories below ground just for them to be able to find the right floor without a map. 
I already imagined a conversation like this: “See George, if you are one of the street-entrance-is-the-ground-floor folk, then I live on the 2nd floor; but if you are one of the-lowest-apartment-on-the-ground-is-the-ground-floor folk then I must tell you that there are two stories below street level in this building so I live on the 4th floor; but, on the other hand, if you are the there-are-multiple-ground-floors kind of guy then I’, on the 2nd floor counting from the street entrance”.
Of course this wasn’t madness, this was just marketing. 
Dugouts, and basement apartments aren’t hip in Zagreb anymore. Nobody in their right mind would pay 800 Euro or more to live in a damp basement, have to listen to 3 families living above