What is it REALLY LIKE To Live in Bucharest? - Romania Vlog

Good morning! Welcome back to Bucharest. Romanian people and Bucharest. What is up with these by the way? Every time I want to get water you have to go and get one of them because you're not going to drink the tap water so you have to go and buy a five litre bottle of water and there's no real recycling so that plastic goes to waste all the time. What is up with that? Yeah, probably not the most positive note to start the video on but I've just been living here for a few months and I don't know why there's not a better solution than that. Maybe there is, maybe, I don't know, maybe you guys will let me know that I've been doing it all wrong but buying water by the five litre bottle and then chucking out the bottle just doesn't make sense. Even in other countries you can just go and refill the bottle downstairs. Anyway, swiftly moving on. I wasn't actually planning on filming today. I thought that today wouldn't be interesting enough to film anything because I haven't really got much going on. I'm still just cracking on with work on the laptop but then I thought I want to show you a bit more of my life and show how I'm leading up to leaving Bucharest and going on this big travel thing again so I whip out the camera and start talking. So I've been living in Bucharest in this flat for the last few months. Yeah, last few months continuously and I've been coming back here since about May time so maybe I could say that I've been living here for around six months on and off. Now what I usually do when I get to a country is I do my first impressions of a country and I did that back in May time. I did my first impressions of Bucharest and that video will pop up somewhere now. But now I've lived here for a bit longer I'd like to give some more impressions about what it's like to live in Bucharest in Romania. Right, a lot of you will know this already but for anyone new that's watching I work online. I run a YouTube channel and among other things I make all my money online so I just work from a laptop. So while I've been living here I've been working from my laptop from this flat and from coffee shops so I can't comment on what it's like to work here if you're working full-time because I'm more of a digital nomad and I work online. But what I can say is that working online from here has been great to be honest. The internet in Romania is insane. This video will probably end up being about a gigabyte in size and to upload that takes about two minutes. That's just an indication of the speed in Romania. Anything you want to do the internet here is lightning fast and I have no idea why but that makes it really easy to work online. As you may be able to tell from the lights around me it's Christmas time right now so it's winter. In terms of weather in Bucharest in the summer the weather was beautiful and I really loved it here in the summer. There was loads of rooftop bars to check out there's always things happening when you walk around there's people playing music in the streets there's events there's things going on in the parks but in the winter everything kind of shuts down. It has a different charm it's December right now and I've been told in January it will get very snowy and very cold but there's less going on. So for me what I'd suggest is Bucharest would be a great place to live in the summer months but from my own experience the winter there's a lot less going on there's a lot less people out on the streets doing things and a lot of it just shuts down. So that's why my plan as some of you guys know is I'm going to be leaving Bucharest with Olivia in a couple weeks and we're going off to some warmer climes. Cost of living wise it's been fantastic here. I earn in dollars online and the dollars go pretty far here in Bucharest. Food is cheap from supermarkets it's relatively cheap if you're earning dollars to go out and eat in Bucharest in restaurants. You'll be looking about five or six dollars for a meal there's obviously there's more expensive places where you're going to pay 10-15 dollars but if you want to go for a reasonably priced meal out then it will only cost you five or six dollars and going for a drink out somewhere will cost you three maybe three four dollars for a pint of beer so maybe less two or three in some places. It can depend like it can go between 5 and 15 lei which is local currency for a beer and 10 to 50 lei for a meal just depending on where you eat. Besides that rent is okay it's not definitely not the cheapest place in eastern Europe for rent and even in Romania. I think Bucharest has the highest rent in Romania because it's the capital but still you can get reasonably priced apartments for three hundred dollars four hundred dollars and yeah it's it's not so bad just relative to what you're earning but overall I would say cost of living is relatively cheap for anywhere in Europe. Public transport in the city is pretty good you can get trams buses metro pretty much everywhere and it's all pretty quick on time and pretty inexpensive even getting taxis around. Taxis normal old-fashioned taxis are a bit more expensive than say Taxify or Uber but if you're looking at getting an Uber or Taxify within the city then you're only going to pay 10 15 lei which is about two or three pound four or five dollars and even to get a taxi out to the airport ends up about 25 30 lei which is again seven or eight dollars I think. If you're wondering what the people are like and obviously that's a big part of moving to a new country or deciding to live in a country then I would say honestly the people here have been very friendly to me. Just Bucharestian and Romanian people in general I've found to be incredibly welcoming and friendly and a very good level of English as well. I've tried to learn some Romanian but I don't speak Romanian and the language I speak best is definitely English and there is a high level of English here so if you're wondering about that considering moving here then you wouldn't have a problem speaking just English but the more Romanian you learn the more appreciated it will be. The last thing I want to say is that I can see Bucharest and Romania becoming a lot more popular as a destination in the future both for general tourism and for digital nomads and travelers thinking about choosing somewhere to live. I'm going to be coming back here in the summer of 2018 because I think it's a very cool place to live and work from and having internet speeds like you do here makes my life very easy and there's still so many parts of Romania that I haven't seen yet. I've seen a lot of places in Romania be shared a lot more recently because it's such a big country that a lot of people don't know that much about and there is a lot to see here and it is growing and it's getting more well known so I think that will increase in the future. So that's pretty exciting and that's exciting to be part of that and to be able to show you guys some of Romania now but then I'm probably going to show you a lot more of it in future as well. I'm going to leave it there I just wanted to create this sort of video giving an honest perspective on what it's been like to live in Bucharest for the last few months and this won't be my last video about Bucharest. I've still got a few more before I fly to Spain next week so check back for that but for now I'll just leave you again. Thank you for watching and this is my life.