Why Bulgaria, and why now?

Thank you all for the positive reaction to my starting this blog. I hope you all find it useful and interesting.


As I said in my first post I need to catch up to where I am at now, and fast, so I can start to record things in near to real time. To this end I am going right back to the beginning....

Why did I chose Bulgaria and why do I even WANT to emigrate?

It all started a couple of years ago when I was living in a lovely house with a large garden and I decided I wanted to grow food. This may seem like a simple thing to decide but for me, who had not really ever done much in the way of real gardening before, it seemed like a big thing for me. I'm not going to go into that (and you can read all about it by going to my other, ongoing, blog The Part Time Homesteader) but it was down to my researches into homesteading that Bulgaria entered the picture.

I read many blogs about growing your own, and trying to become self sufficient from having zero previous experiences and one of the blogs which I came to read as regularly as the author updated was The Gud Life blog, written by a man who had bought a place in Bulgaria and was teaching himself from scratch ways to support himself.

Over time, and with the growing going well, it became more and more apparent to me that I wanted to get out of England and go somewhere closer to growing living things and the thought of what Dom was doing kept coming back to me. Through another acquaintance I met other people who were over there having escaped our daily grind and in particularly one lady was exceptionally welcoming.

I spent some time searching on eBay (yes, eBay) for houses and the prices were amazing; I regularly saw large houses with 2-3000 square metres of land sell for around £3000; houses which looked like they needed some freshening up but were by no means falling down wrecks. A couple of emails to previous customers of Investment Link gave me a small measure of confidence with the company; of those who replied, none complained of fraud and the only negative was one chap saying that the house with an "internal" toilet had turned out to have the loo in the garage.

With all these thoughts running through my head the decision was made to go and visit and see how welcoming, how comfortable and how much like home Bulgaria would be.

This trip was booked to take place in February 2012; our first visit to Bulgaria.