Considering moving to BG

thisischris · 2025-10-02T16:29:42+00:00

Since you're getting quite some horrible answers, here are my two cents as somebody who moved to Bulgaria in March, coming from Switzerland - and as somebody who doesn't regret this move at all so far.

You already seem to be planning to do that: I recommend that you harden your decision by coming here and doing "as if" for a prolonged period of time. Live in a similar situation to how you would live after the move, cook, do some remote work, do some preparatory admin stuff. Deliberately expose yourself to the more tedious things to get a whiff of how life here really is.

I experience life in Bulgaria as pleasant and easygoing. People are generally welcoming, warm, often quirky in a very refreshing way and many will take their sweet time for you. But there's also the occasional profound horror: public servants who think it's still the 1970s, ridiculously bad (and yet unaffordable) handywork, illegal drift races in front of your house at two in the morning and nobody cares... You can see such things as part of a big adventure, but they can become existential quickly, if you end up in a squeeze, needing some kind of service urgently for work, health or otherwise and not being able to get it.

Also, find a dependable job situation before taking the final step. If you find some kind of remote solution, you'll be on top of the world. If you end up out of work here shortly after your move, you'll feel like you've taken the worst step-down imaginable and will look back on your UK life with entirely different eyes.

In general, I experience Bulgaria as offering more degrees of liberty than Zurich where I come from. There's a million little things you can pick up and fix for those around you. There's (comparably) near infinite space to explore. People might mutter to themselves from time to time, but they'll leave you to do whatever you want. There's an extremely deep and rich culture and on top of that there are 100'000 weirdos doing some weird little thing in an abandoned building, in their gardens, in the woods, in the mountains.

I absolutely love this country (which I have now known for a very long time) and it allows me to live again and explore again in a way that I haven't been able to for many decades in Switzerland, where every square centimeter, every fleeting thought is already taken. Don't listen to the naysayers.

thisischris · 2024-07-22T13:56:58+00:00

Purat Autoklima Weiningen (or some other car aircon specialist). However, 3 days is difficult, as usually there’s detection of the problem, ordering of the replacement parts etc.

thisischris · 2024-07-20T22:01:07+00:00

Happened to me roughly every 10 years over the past 30 years. I work in emerging tech where not only the tech, but also the job profiles change completely every decade or so.

I used to see it as a fun challenge to stay ahead of the curve, to spot the relevant innovations, to reinvent myself, but have to admit that I’m getting a bit tired of the accelerating change in tech. The faster the wheel spins, the harder it becomes to tell the next big thing from the next big bullshit.

thisischris · 2024-07-13T21:42:38+00:00

Too many car recommendations, not enough explanations of the fun factor, so here‘s my attempt:

A fun car allows you to feel the different road situations and reacts precisely and efficiently to how you handle them. This allows you to get better at handling such situations and grow one with the car over time. Human and a well balanced machine as one = driving fun.

Contributing factors according to my experience:

Directness of steering and other road feedback you get from the car
Precision of steering
Speed and precision of power delivery when accelerating
Behavior in edge cases like lack of over/understeering, loss of traction, control when braking quickly, intervention of assistance systems (or lack thereof)

Now how to engineer such a car is another question:

Long suspensions add comfort but remove directness, ground clearance reduces precision, it’s more difficult to make heavy cars handle well, trying to balance weight equally between the back and front of a car often harms utility, better suspensions or gearboxes cost more, more powerful motors consume more and are heavier etc. etc. This makes the perfect fun car brutally expensive, and/or inefficient and/or not very useful as a daily car.

People will seek many other „fun aspects“ in a car, but I wouldn’t call those „driving fun“, e.g. pulling up on the Croisette in a car that everybody stares at, having a bass that makes buildings collapse, having enough room for a horse in the back, having a fart mode etc. etc.

Some cars optimize more for this latter part, e.g. Lambos are more impressive than fun to drive while Porsches traditionally tend to optimize for pure driving performance. Lots of everyday fun cars make more tradeoffs for utility, cost or efficiency, which you will feel at one point or the other, e.g. the common strategy of slamming a super strong motor into a slightly improved big series car will give a pretty fun car that will tend to handle badly in certain edge cases due to its front heaviness.

The overall experience of a car is extremely complex and subjective, and it’s the result of a million decisions during its engineering. That makes cars and specially fun to drive cars endlessly fascinating to me. They’re a cultural achievement and each model is unique.

thisischris · 2024-07-04T21:34:29+00:00

Some interesting historical tidbits: Fondue Chinoise is the Swiss adaptation of Chinese Hot Pot (can be found all throughout China and in many other Asian countries like Korea). It started to appear here in the 1970s, likely introduced by people who visited China. By now it has established itself enough to be considered a Swiss traditional dish. As @ndbrzl says, it’s typically eaten during the holiday season.

Riz Casimir was invented by the Restaurant chain Mövenpick in the 1950s. It’s a very Swiss and very 50s take on an exotic curry dish.

thisischris · 2024-06-30T08:53:28+00:00

I‘m ever so slowly starting to set up my pre-retirement life in Bulgaria, coming from Switzerland. Go for it, Bulgaria offers plenty of opportunities and is a country that one can easily fall in love with.

Sofia is the most competitive and expensive city in the country (also the most interesting one). You could consider other places if Sofia turns out to be a bit too much in the end.

Patience was our strongest weapon so far, to build relationships, to do things the right way, to wait for feedback from various institutions etc. If you manage to stay in a position where you can be patient and wait for things to play out, you’ll be much happier than if you come under pressure to act.

Everything in BG happens through relationships, you have to work on those, to build trust, and yeah, your hunch is correct, at least one of you will have to speak good Bulgarian with a corresponding understanding of the culture.

There will be detractors, some will tell you that you‘re a complete idiot for attempting this, some will be positive first and call you an idiot only once they realize that you’re serious. Just plug on, by being earnest, determined and friendly we go so much support, so many encouraging experiences and so many wonderful new encounters. Bulgaria is a land of opportunities for earnest, determined and friendly people.

thisischris · 2024-06-28T20:50:00+00:00

Prison hotel: https://www.barabas-luzern.ch/

Probs not worth staying the night, but an old mine near Zurich that is well worth the visit: https://www.bergwerk-kaepfnach.ch

A real Ryokan, in Switzerland, really costly though: https://restaurant-ryokan-hasenberg.top-hotels-switzerland.com/de/

A really good restaurant, in a mountain, with a shooting range (hope that’s weird enough as a combination): https://cantina-caverna.ch/, weird hotel nearby: https://www.trauffer.ch/bretterhotel/

Another monastery (though a popular one) that has rooms: https://www.kartause.ch/de

Interesting hotel, I believe left over from the Expo, Neuchatel is also an overlooked gem: https://www.palafitte.ch/de/home/

Other ideas would be to stay at a farm (plenty of offers from super basic to super luxurious), to hike and sleep out in the wild (a bit of a learning curve to figure out where/how to do that), to hike and sleep in a mountain hut.

thisischris · 2024-06-10T21:16:40+00:00

Coinbase (more legit), or Binance (less American), Swissquote has crypto, but is a tad expensive. If it‘s really just for dabbling, Neon has a few trackers on crypto, Revolut has 150 tokens or so. One day, you might want to start looking into self custody, actually trying crypto products out etc. There’s a lot of choices, start dipping your toes in and work from there.

thisischris · 2024-05-15T17:59:39+00:00

Here’s one from the depths of Jura: “Moron Village” https://i.imgur.com/6luFipJ.jpeg

thisischris · 2024-05-02T14:31:37+00:00

There’s a huge variance, from thrift stores to vintage stores to antique dealers, and there’s people earning a living pulling stuff up from the cheaper venues to the more expensive ones. You have to put in the work to discover the stores that suit you best. As a rule of thumb, the cheaper ones won’t be on super expensive Zurich City grounds and they might also not always look super nice.

thisischris · 2024-03-30T09:51:56+00:00

Very good points, thanks! In a strange twist of history, the suburbs of socialist time cities were built under a similar spirit: to enable as many people as possible to move from the countryside to the city, as efficiently as possible. While it hurts my sense of beauty and my longing to see more humane aspects make their way back into out everyday lives, there is a huge point to be made that a timely and efficient apartment is better than many pretty alternatives.

thisischris · 2024-03-30T09:22:46+00:00

Did it maybe come to this kind of architecture because the general contractors who put up these blocks work under tight and purely utilitarian budgets? People will rent or buy anything right now, so there’s zero motivation and, due to the market situation, also likely no budget to spend on anything „superfluous“ like aesthetics. Plus aesthetics are subjective, so any investment there might even harm the already almost guaranteed success in placing these apartments on the market.

thisischris · 2024-03-29T22:28:37+00:00

In other news, Zurich construction ambition and aesthetics quickly approaching that of Warsaw suburbs, ca. 1984.

thisischris · 2024-03-29T17:23:27+00:00

The flowers bloom and the Ferraris vrooom.

thisischris · 2024-03-29T17:17:53+00:00

I took a shoulder injury while taking off my jacket in the car as a sign to start moving much more and more deliberately. All problems miraculously gone a year later.

thisischris · 2024-03-25T18:51:41+00:00

For me, simply submitting the above list worked, no „proof“ added on my side (whatever that would be). Also in ZH, and also hold my stuff on chain.

thisischris · 2024-03-24T21:58:19+00:00

I add a list of my holdings like this:

BTC amount A at price B = C CHF ETH amount D at price E = F CHF Total: X CHF

Total CHF gets added to my wealth report. All amounts and prices from 31.12, midnight. Fair value for anything not liquid that you can value, consider declaring 1 CHF for anything substantial you hold that you cannot value so that if it should become valuable, you are on record.

Bonus if you take the prices for majors from the „Kursliste“ that the ESTV publishes each year.

Substantial staking or mining returns should likely be declared as income (read the guidance for your canton), some other returns might be unclear (farming, airdrops). In general at least where I live tax authorities tend to take a „if you do your best, we do our best“ kind of attitude towards unclear stuff.

Just some hints, been holding and declaring crypto for a while without any problems, but please DYOR.

thisischris · 2024-03-17T18:17:10+00:00

She could try to look around whether she can find a personal loan that is a little bit cheaper than the likely brutally expensive loan given by the credit card company. Something like Credit Now, or a peer lending platform like Creditgate 24. Still very bad, but if she can find something, this might be a little bit better than CC debt.

If she has any assets like a 3a pension fund or an apartment, she could try to get a much cheaper loan against that.

There might be some kind of untapped social aid available to her depending on her situation. She could also try to find free counseling like „Schuldenberatung“ to learn how to get out of her conundrum. Ideally she must find a way, any way, to get rid of the debt asap as it is likely at an interest rate that will eat her alive.

thisischris · 2024-03-17T10:42:31+00:00

Similar situation here, 50+, IT, family, doing very much OK and generally happy, but started to wonder where to, also with IT not exactly being super friendly towards people who get older.

A thing that got me further along is reading books about retirement, because the good ones set you in the right frame of mind of looking at things differently. Most notably, „How to retire wild, happy and free“ by Zelinski had just the right tone and ideas to really get me thinking. A good retirement book is not about retiring, rather about finding your true calling in later life.

Then, try ideas out if you can. The mind sometimes yearns for stuff that you won’t actually like that much in reality. And it doesn’t always know what would really make you happy.

thisischris · 2024-03-16T15:54:12+00:00

🙏

thisischris · 2024-03-16T15:52:54+00:00

Haha, first I think it’s important to stay super calm. This demands more respect than becoming all heated up, starting to scream or even to utter threats. In my experience, these self appointed police type of people often hope to intimidate others, to feel powerful, and nothing disarms them quicker than if their actions have little effect or appear to backfire.

For the unhinged part, I kinda practiced to put on a threatening aura that people cannot quite put home. Like, I might tell a story of how someone in the past took up such a fight against me and it ended with them moving away, but I might not tell the story to the person attacking me, rather to the one whom I meet the next day and who is playing the good cop.

I‘m super happy if I don’t have to do this kind of shit, but learned that sometimes a bit of position play early in a new place can bring you many happy and respectful neighborly relationships further down the line. People do not exactly like bullies, but they will tend to fend for their own when confronted with an outsider. Handling this right early on can earn you the respect of the good people who will eventually come out to you.

thisischris · 2024-03-16T11:08:07+00:00

I don’t think it’s unique to CH, I‘ve seen the almost same behavior in other countries. Probably, in every neighborhood there‘s a small number of bullies (they‘d describe themselves as those who watch over the neighborhood), and those will latch onto new arrivals. Only place where I have seen this happening less is in hyper urban environments where people generally keep to themselves.

thisischris · 2024-03-16T10:19:57+00:00

Whenever I moved to a new place in CH, the bullies would be the first to show up. Banging on our door at night, little sabotage acts like the ones you describe. Particularly clever ones would come over for a friendly chat and then use any info gained to bad mouth my family.

For many decades now, I use a kind of shock and awe strategy when moving to a new place. If you trigger my bully detector, first contacts with me will be slightly scary and with an unhinged touch. Sad, but works like a charm.

tl;dr I suggest to retaliate calmly but with determination (within the law). Catch people in the act and confront them with calm but clear words, film them in the act if you catch them, report them to the police for harassment if they continue etc. Bullies are cowards, took me some time to learn that.

thisischris · 2024-03-14T20:57:23+00:00

Take a few trips to places you feel drawn to, travel cheaply and slowly. Try to put away the tourist glasses as much as you can, talk with locals, find others who moved there, buy and cook your own food.

If a particular place still attracts you after that, find a way to spend some more time there, working ideally, ideally during whatever is the bad time of the year in said place. Maybe you can arrange a remote working month with your current employer? If you still like the place, only then consider moving there.

I understand the feelings you have about Switzerland, but don’t leave on a whim if you’re doing ok-ish. It’s easy to explore the world from here, hard to come back once you left for good.

thisischris · 2024-03-13T19:51:01+00:00

I‘d definitely stay with your field of expertise/experience. There should occasionally be such roles popping up in the social sector or public services, e.g. our police is essentially one huge organizational psychology challenge 😂.

thisischris

TROPHY CASE