What Families Get WRONG Moving To Bulgaria (6 Months Later)

How did we get this so wrong? If you want to truly integrate and feel a part of the community, you need to quickly realise a few things. You need to learn the language. You need to show up to the local festivals and genuinely immerse yourself in the environment. You have to hang out with the locals and see how they live and do as they do. On a practical level, you realise you need the right tools and equipment to get the job done efficiently out here. We've been living in Bulgaria for over six months now and we're seeing more and more families making the exact same move, but it's only now that the penny has finally dropped for us. Welcome to Fresh Start Sticks. We're a family of five that left the UK, moved abroad and bought a house in rural Bulgaria. But that's not where the story ends. We've started the house renovations, but more on that later. Right now, we're harvesting our sour cherries, also known as tart cherries. It's like one of those... those meows where you can hear the bees and all the things. Oh, is it? That's something. And I'll move on something without us knowing. Or if it's actually real life. Oh, right. Sounds like it's real life, yeah. Right, yeah. Right, end stop. Two... Ah! Big one there! We've got tonnes and tonnes of these. We're going to share a few with our neighbours, so we're going to drop a few down to a couple of our neighbours that's in our area. Because, like, we've got tonnes left and we've still got tonnes soaking in some water. We're going to pick up some pallets and use it probably to do our fence. I don't know. I've seen YouTube and then people did stuff. So we're going to see how this looks. Is that a male or female? Male, looks like. Male wolf spider guys. The females have about a million babies on the back of them. At some point, definitely. A million too many. Two million. We didn't stay around long enough to count them. The ones we didn't use, we're just going to put them back at the house and leave them there. And then you guys are going to see what we're going to create. So far on the house renovations, we've replaced the mud floors with wood. We've repaired our roof because we had a leak and we've painted the internal walls. Time for some food. All right, guys, that's where our trailer. Ivo, we gave it to Ivo, our neighbour, and he's using it to move the hay around. How are you? Oh, it's very hot. Way too hot. No, that's why I need a lump hammer. Well, you've already done it now. Yeah, I hope there's more to come though. Remove the dirt and then I need to put plastic sheets and then put hardcore on top. There's so much nice people in Bougainvillea. Lovely to meet you. Thank you. Bye, bye. We're good, thank you. Wow. UK. You speak English? Yes, I live in the US. Bougainvillea? Yes. My child 24 years is there. Wow. Oh, you come back to Bougainvillea? Yeah, only summer. Only summer? Only summer for a month. I'm 70 years. You look good. Yes. Yeah, I'm strong. It's the Bougainvillean food. You want meat, you come to a meat festival. You come to a meat festival in Bougainvillea and you will have a good time. This is the queue. Oh my God, it's crazy. It is so busy in here. You will absolutely love it. It's crazy. Everyone's chilling. You've got the feed hall and then you've got people over there like eating, drinking and chilling. Everyone's friendly. Everyone's having a good time. People are smiling. People are eating. You've got the stage where you've got a performance going on. It's amazing. You will absolutely love it. Everyone's having a good time and just loving the environment. So am I. Chris is just taking it all in. First time in a boat car. Yes. We stopped at a bar in Junenica and first time. First time here. So we are just ordering a frappe and a beer. Drove past and the guy said hello. So we stopped. Nice to meet you. Are you from Junenica? Do you? Nice place. Thank you very much. We've had the boat car shipped over and now Chris is doing the maintenance. The weather's good. The boat car comes out and we're going travelling. So first Chris is doing the general annual maintenance that's needed to make sure that this car is safe on the road and safe in the water. Right, that's the stabiliser on there. There you go. It's all ready to go. I've finished the protection application. The EZ Marine anti-corrosion grease on some parts of it. But this is the main thing. The spray. As you see in the video, I put it on there. It looks absolutely amazing. We're going to see how it goes. Test it on the water and the road and we'll let you know how it fares on this car. After a few days of doing other jobs around here, I'm back and as you can see, it's got a lot bigger. I've come up to here now. I'm trying to make it a nice big square. I'm going to level the soil, put the plastic down, make sure there's no rocks in it and then put hardcore on top. I've had to come a bit further. The question is, where do I stop? I'll have to do that as well. I'm concentrating on doing this. Yeah, it's been a problem. So let's get back to it. We went to collect some milk today because we always get the milk from our local farmer and they gave me this flower. What is this flower called? Rue. And hope it roots. We're going to look at some machinery for our land because we realise that doing it all by hand is very difficult. When you're in Bulgaria, you cannot have land like this without one of these. Right, so the machine I'm looking at is a TL25S. Also, something that's versatile can go off-terrain. That's very important. Do we get one of these or do we get something bigger? I'm with Vensi and he is the big boss here. Vensi's been showing us around. This guy's awesome. We've looked at this one. We looked at a bigger one, which is about €23,000, €25,000. So we've got to decide, do we pay €25,000 or do we go for something a bit more modest, a bit more sensible, which is this? It can be exciting for everyone, isn't it? This size. Buying a second-hand machine is good, but it comes with problems, no? The problems are starting and the most important question in this direction is, who will service that machine in the future? Because there are many people who are selling second-hand machines around, but they are selling machines which are 10, 15 years old, which are already old models and it's hard to find spare parts for it, hard to find service for it. With our tractors, we have three years of warranty. So we have also 12 skillful people to service the tractors in our service workshop and we are very busy with taking spare parts in stock. And it's very positive for company Tata is that they have also a big spare part facility in Europe, in Germany, which is servicing European markets, so you don't need to wait for receiving parts from another continent or whatever. I'm very surprised because I've not looked at machinery in Bulgaria because everyone said it's price expensive. For the money of Coltiv, you are getting a lot of equipment which can last for years and it's going to be good if you've got so many works on your land. This is ideal. Unfortunately for me, I do the work, so I need something good. Springs in Bulgaria is where a lot of locals get their water from and it is good enough to drink. The water's perfectly clear, it's perfectly clean. Very nice. And it's, you know, it's better than tap water. It's better than... It's very hydrating. Yeah, we don't drink tap water, by the way. No, no, no. It's better than tap.