Hey guys! So it is my last Friday after three months living in Bansko, Bulgaria and I'm
getting sentimental. It's bittersweet.
But I want to take this opportunity to talk to a few of the fellow digital nomads here at the co-working space before we
feast and ask them what they do. How long they've been digital nomads and
what brought them to Bansko and why they like it here?
I was brought here by Johnny FD because he was kind of singing the praises of
Bansko from what he had read online and it was all new to me.
I haven't considered coming to Bulgaria before but I had well-defined criteria for the next destination
I wanted to go to. I wanted it to be
low cost of living,
healthy lifestyle, fresh air, quiet good internet, and good co-working opportunities. And
Bansko just kind of checked the boxes on everything. The reason I like living here so much is because it's just
pleasant and easy if you
want to get work done. But also have a good balance with a social life.
It's a great place to come even though it's a small village.
Hi guys!
We're here at co-working Bansko with the owners Matthias and Ueie and they're gonna tell us why they started it.
So we came here in the summer to check out the ski resort to see if this would actually be a year-round like location for
co-working space and we were totally amazed. I mean there's so many things that are happening in the summer.
Now this week is Jazz Festival where four whole weeks in town is bringing all kind of famous
jazz musicians go play on the town square.
There are other festivals like the Movie Festival and the Opera Festival,
and all kind of things organized by the municipality.
Plus of course the mountains. You can go mountain biking, we go to Greece frequently. We can go to wine tastings.
There's many many things that we can do here. And when we first came here, we were really just a base.
It is little village that offers all these possibilities.
We want to get nomads. We want to get really cool people around us, entrepreneurs
who share the same spirit and same ideas.
To meet them and to work with them to work amongst them. Bansko is very affordable
compared to a lot of other co-working spaces where often you go to the co-working spaces closest to where you live or
maybe you travel to a co-working space to go there for months.
Our proposition is a little bit more extreme.
So basically we want people to move into our little village and
so far, we were pretty successful visit because the cost of living in Bansko is very affordable. You can
live very well. It's like 500 to 1,000 euros.
You can rent an apartment,
450 euros you can buy a studio, apartment for 10,000 euros.
And so this is a really interesting proposition for people's are looking for a base now.
We have hundred megabits up and down Synchron
internet connection for both spaces and which is really really fast. It's really cool to a surfing the web here.
Co-workingBasko, and they will find all the information there.
Hi, my name is Sebastian. I've been location-independent for the last two years.
I'm from Montreal, Quebec, Canada
And I work as a web developer. I came to Bansko because my business partner Arlene who also founded the Nomad soul mates
made a retreat here in last December and it was a big success and she told me how awesome the space was and
she told me about the founders here and
it just seemed like a place that I had to visit. And I'm really glad I did because it's been awesome
because it's a small town and it's a small community. We pretty much stick together and we're always hanging out
every day and we even have activities in the daytime as well as the nighttime co-working spaces that are too large.
Or that are in big cities you
kind of have a good vibe during the day. But then people get scattered and people don't really hang out after hours.
So I really like it when it's a small
town and a smaller co-working space and then
you really get to know everyone very quickly and you can really integrate in socialize a lot. I
think we're really happy that we moved to Bansko. I think it was one of the best decisions we've ever made
Part of what is so nice about being in Bansko is how unexpected it was we weren't originally supposed to come here
we were scrambling for a new place to come and
we got here and it turned out to be the best place
we've come to so far for a whole bunch of different reasons.
Yeah.
I mean when you,
when you hear about places that you want to visit when you're traveling the world, you don't hear Bansko, Bulgaria.
But the fact is this is really beautiful and it's incredibly affordable,
and it was you know after being in Italy and we were in Malta where was really dry and arid,
it's great to be somewhere where it's really lush and green and it's just wonderfully relaxing and Bansko is so charming.
I mean the town the trees, that the red tile roofs,
we actually were looking at a place the other day at a friend's place and we're looking out over view and
we sort of saw Bansko spread out in front of us and then the red roofs and the green trees it was that was
really special. It's a great place and as digital nomads, you know, it's so peaceful
that we're getting a lot of work done.
The fact is we can you know
we're both in the middle of projects and we're being really really productive and we're just writing a ball having
discovered a place like Bansko that we've never heard of and we didn't know anything about. And
that we've so fallen in love with. It's made us think the world must be filled with with Bansko. So everybody knows Paris, everybody
know Sydney, everybody knows San Francisco. But there are a lot of places people don't know and as digital nomads
we've got the freedom to find those. In fact is, the more you travel the more you realize there are places
you've never been and you hear about all these great places from the people you meet. And you think oh,
I want to go there next and so I think
we're probably going to be doing this for the rest of our lives.
In terms of making new friends that's been the most amazing thing about being a digital nomad is
the number of people we have met from around the world and when you're digital nomads
and when you're co-living you get to know people in a way that's surprisingly quickly and surprisingly deep. And we've met people that
we haven't seen for a year and yet were in touch with them and we're making plans to. You know,
go to the same digital Nomad place in Bali or Vietnam next year. And
it's amazing, the friendships,, we've made. I wouldn't trade them for anything.
I think
the irony is, I think most people have become digital nomads are people who feel like they,
maybe didn't quite fit in at home among their family or their hometown and the irony is
so all of us start to travel and we meet each other and
those of us who didn't fit in we fit in with each other.
We saw I so we sort of feel like we found our tribe on the road. It's very strange
but all these people they didn't fit in create sort of a community that
and so I find myself talking to somebody from Singapore or somebody from Poland or
somebody from the UK and in a way
I feel like I have more common more in common with them than I do anybody from America.
So I do kind of feel like I've I think we feel like we found our tribe. Hello. I'm Jurgen. I know boss.
I'm from Belgium. I've been working remotely for
five years now. I
came to Bulgaria three years ago.
I came to Bansko because I had I merely solved there is a community of like-minded people here.
Not only just people that understand that you can make money online which is kind of like the basic
but what I also like is there's all kinds of people here that like want to do all kinds of
weird health things like different diets and what not, and I'm pretty passionate about that stuff.
So that was also like the really deep
thing that brought me here. Hi, my name is Diamond. I'm from Holland in Rotterdam. I've been digital nomad for two years now.
I work as a Wordpress Developer.
And so far I've always been to Southeast Asia and it was time for something new and I never been to Eastern Europe. So
Then I heard many few things about Ben's car. So I decided to call me so far. I really like it.
It's close to nature, magic community
soccer every day. I
like the Friday barbecue.
We play soccer as often as we can in the evening and
it's very easy to go hiking and there are a lot of other events.
Yeah, just meetups in general dinner.
It's not the single thing that I like most. It's just hanging out with a group of people, go out for dinner.
Barbecue, I think many different things. Hi. My name is Avi. I'm from,
Currently my stuff is in Miami. I
work for a company called IDT. They're based out of New Jersey. I think having this split workspace is actually
really interesting, like if you want to just tune out the world and get to work is it?
You know the quiet space this way and then if you want to still work
but have people around and you go hang out over there and to have that.
Both of those
options available and completely separate is
has been pretty,
change of pace.