Here's a look at a fairly recent gas receipt.
Price per liter: 10.38 kuna
Exchange rate: 1 kuna = .18 USD
Metric conversion: 1 liter = .26 gallon
Value Added Tax (that gets slapped onto everything you buy): 25%
Who has a headache yet?
After punching a bunch of shit into the calculator, it comes to about $7.23/gallon.
So as if paying 517 kuna for a tank of gas (that's 94 dollars, folks) isn't bad enough, you also get to pay a 25% tax, which brings it up to 646.26 kuna. Final damage - 117 dollars.
On the bright side, as long as we buy gas at Ina, we get that 25% back once every few months, after Scot takes in all of the receipts into the Embassy for stamping and documentation and who knows what else. I think the guy also sprinkles some magical fairy dust on it as well. Because it makes that much sense to me. The 25% tax isn't limited to gas, it's applied to everything you buy here except for milk and bread. But because we are part of the Diplomat community (and thus not Croatian citizens), we are entitled to get that money back. The fun part is that each store seems to have their own policy on how to deal with this reimbursement, it's like a surprise every time! The procedure for us is to say "R-1" (but in Croatian of course, say it with me...it sounds like this: "Air Yay-don") sometime during the checkout process and hope that the cashier has at least some idea of what you're trying to say. You show your diplomatic ID with a 11 digit "OIB" number, and if all goes well they print out a special receipt. Some will reimburse with cash right at the store, a few don't add the tax at all...but most require a horribly inefficient second trip to the store to get the money back from a second cashier (after you do the whole fairy dust thing that I described above). I suspect by the time we're done with this tour we will have donated hundreds of dollars to the local government. Either inadvertently or because we're lazy. You're welcome, Croatia.
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