Trogir is a small historic town and UNESCO World Heritage Site located on the Adriatic coast, about 15 miles outside Split, and a little piece of history waiting to be discovered. If your idea of a holiday to remember involves wandering around ancient cobbled streets, browsing souvenir stores crammed into medieval buildings from another time and sitting at street cafes pretending to have been transported a few hundred years into the past, Trogir is somewhere not to be missed - although if you'd rather lay on a beach topping up your tan than go anywhere near a little culture, you might want instead to slap your travel agent around the face and demand your money back immediately. The town is also incredibly easy to get to, the number 37 bus travelling between Split and Trogir via the airport every 20 minutes during the day and 30 at night. If you've ever had any qualms about travelling to somewhere a little exotic simply because of worries about public transport links, let me put your mind at ease straight away - everywhere in Croatia is pretty much connected to everywhere else via an exceptionally clean, fast and regular bus service 7 days a week, although if you're travelling outside or between the major cities you'll probably want to check the schedule as there might only be one or two buses a day to your next destination. In fact, for some of the more long haul journeys - it takes about 9 hours to travel from Dubrovnik to Zagreb on the bus - you'll find multiple options each day, some requiring changes and some not. You'll want to sit down in advance and decide where you want to be and at what time, and ensure that there's a bus that'll get you to your destination before everyone goes to bed, but there is certainly no lack of availability in terms of getting anywhere.

Once again, I've been staying with a local family in their beautiful home just outside the historic centre of Trogir. I've quite taken to this option, actually - everything was arranged speedily through EasyToBook, and no sooner had my money gone flying off into the ether, I was receiving friendly emails from my host asking if I needed picking up from the bus station, if I had any special dietary requirements, and if I needed to be flown in on a private jet. Actually, I made that last one up, although my host did drive me along the coast on my last day and show me some of the more scenic spots I may otherwise have missed. The family I was staying with consisted of a young man, his wife and their daughter, and I honestly don't think they could've done more to make me feel at home. I had my own room away from the main house, although the two were connected by a balcony, and every morning I was invited to join them for breakfast on the verandah while their daughter played quietly around our feet. It was like being part of the family. Unlike back in Dubrovnik, my hosts spoke perfect English and regaled me with stories of their travels and of places to see while I was in the country, although unfortunately there was no way I could see it all in the time I had. It was like having my own personal tour guide, and believe me, you can get no better advice than that of a local, as I have discovered on many occasions where some of the nicest places I've visited have been recommended to me not by guide books or websites but by random people I've spoken to in McDonalds.

If, as a British citizen - or American, Australian or Martian for that matter - you wake up one morning and decide that you'd really like to look stupid today, I can thoroughly recommend taking a trip to Europe. Not only do they do nearly everything we take for granted in the most bizarre way possible, but they somehow manage to do it with a nonchalance that instantly makes you feel that you've been doing it wrong all your life and must immediately change. In France, of course, no imagination is required - this is actually happening, and everyone around you really does think you're an idiot, but thankfully, whenever anyone in the rest of Europe shrugs at you, it is usually accompanied by a warm smile which tells you that everything's fine. Bread, for example, almost never comes with butter or any other type of vegetable based spread in this part of the world - so you are either expected to eat it bone dry or spend at least half an hour trying in vain to explain that that you don't want to have to gag on your breakfast while trying to force it down with the blunt end of a fork. You would think, wouldn't you, that the last thing you'd want in a country where the temperature nearly always approaches that at the centre of the sun, was to be forced to eat your food bone dry without so much as a lick of moisture in sight - but apparently, putting butter on your bread out here is only slightly less strange than dancing the fandango on your balcony at three o'clock in the morning dressed as a bear.

To illustrate just how alien the concept of vegetable based spreads are to the people of Eastern Europe, I asked the waiter at brunch on the harbour front this morning for some butter to go with my bread, and then I stuck my iPhone in his face to record his reaction. His expression quickly cycled between the happy smile he had been exhibiting up until that point, a slight frown, and a blank state of utter confusion. Finally, having performed a scene from Fawlty Towers almost verbatim, he was forced to confess that he hadn't got a clue what I was saying to him. I explained, in that unintentionally patronising way we English do when something inexplicably isn't going our way, that I didn't want to choke on my breakfast, and he informed me that I would have to pay 40 Kuna extra - about 4 pounds sterling - for this option, but that it would also come with a cappuccino, croissant, glass of orange juice and a selection of jams. Now that's what you call up selling - he actually wanted me to pay for an entirely new breakfast option to go with my cooked one, just so that I could make use of the butter than went with it. Croissants, you see, come with butter - because they're not complete barbarians. It may not come as a complete surprise to learn, dear reader, that I decided to pass. To be fair, the waiter did return of his own accord a few minutes later with a dish of butter, having obviously cleared this with the management, and explained politely that he had only been thinking about his job - but by then the damage was done and I had managed to scrape most of the skin from the back of my throat. C'est la vie, as they say in Rome.

Bread in this part of the world, while I'm on the subject, doesn't always even resemble the bread you'll be familiar with. If you order what the locals seem to think is a traditional continental breakfast from any of a ridiculous number of umbrella covered outdoor cafes on the harbour front, what you'll get is ham, cheese, slices of spicy sausage, eggs and bread - and the bread will more often than not consist of triangular flour covered pieces of something mysterious which more closely resemble donuts that haven't quite been fried for long enough. Obviously, we all know how sick eating an under fried donut makes you feel, so I'll leave you to imagine what trying to force one down your throat bone dry with ham and cheese is like. The ham also tends to resemble something hacked randomly from the side of a pig by a blindfolded work experience trainee at the slaughterhouse, and doesn't necessarily seem to have been anywhere near any sort of cooking implement for a terribly long time, but you're in a different part of the world so you make do. There's always a fast food place within walking distance if you really can't stomach the local cuisine.

I managed to make myself look ever so slightly stupid to my hosts this morning by asking where the kettle was so that I could make a cup of coffee in my room - there were countless packets of exotic coffees in the cupboard, but nothing with which to boil any water. Except, of course, that it hadn't occurred to my pampered brain that I might actually be expected to get a pan out of the cupboard and boil the water manually over the stove. You're probably thinking, by now, that I couldn't have made myself look more out of place in Trogir if I'd tried, what with my strange decadent western ways - but I shall leave the last word, today, to my host. Three out of five Americans who stay with him, he insists - his words, not mine - are imbeciles who want to know whether they will be safe on the streets of Croatia. So obviously, he stabs them. No, he doesn't, I made that up... he shoots them. Repeat ad infinitum.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.