Six months have passed since I moved to Limassol. In March I was packing boxes; now it’s September, the sea is still warm, and people around me have started asking the same question, in almost the same words: “Fine, but what do you miss about Romania?” Some ask out of curiosity, others with a hint of reproach, as if I had left a party without saying goodbye. I wrote separately about why I moved to Cyprus.
I promised myself I would answer honestly, not diplomatically. So here’s the short answer: I miss my friends. That’s it. And because I miss them, I fly back often to see them. The long answer is the rest of this article, because distance changes the way you look at the place you left, and I think that’s worth writing about.
Why I left, in a nutshell
I’ve already written about the reasons, so I won’t go through them all again. In short: the weather, the sea, the clean air, an open society, a state that treats entrepreneurs fairly and transparently, more reasonable taxes on labour, and a country where English is used everywhere, in government offices and in business. None of that is running away. These are things I actively went looking for, after many years of building companies in Romania and learning first-hand what overnight tax changes do to a business.
The one thing I really miss
Friends don’t move with you. You can take your furniture, your laptop, your contracts, even your habits. But the people you grew up with, started businesses with, stayed up until 3 a.m. with talking about important or completely pointless things, stay behind. And there’s no app that replaces a long dinner where nobody checks the time.
The good news is that Limassol isn’t the end of the world. The flight to Bucharest takes about as long as a Friday-evening drive from Bucharest to Brasov (a mountain town a couple of hours north, notorious for weekend traffic), and it’s often less stressful. So I go back often. Sometimes for business, sometimes just for dinner with friends. I’ve noticed that when you know you’re leaving in a few days, you spend your time differently: you stop postponing, you stop saying “let’s catch up next week”. You catch up now.
What I appreciate more from a distance
It’s a strange thing: only when you leave do you start seeing clearly the good things that were right under your nose. From Cyprus, Romania looks more energetic than it did from Bucharest. People are ambitious, they move fast, they learn fast. The tech scene is full of very good people who could work anywhere in the world and choose to build from home.
- Entrepreneurial energy. In Romania, if you have an idea on Monday, by Friday you’ve found three people who want to try it with you.
- Technical talent. Romanian developers, designers and marketers are among the best I’ve seen, and I say that after years of working with clients abroad.
- Humour. Romanians find a joke in almost any situation. I miss it more than I expected.
- Food. Cypriot food is excellent, but a good ciorba (Romanian sour soup) is still a good ciorba.
What frustrates me more from a distance
Distance works the other way too. Things that annoyed me in Romania now annoy me even more, because I have a daily point of comparison. When you see a public office reply to an email in English, clearly and to the point, it gets harder to accept the queues, the rubber stamps and the rules that change from one month to the next.
What frustrates me most is unpredictability. An entrepreneur can live with high taxes if they’re stable. They can live with bureaucracy if it’s logical. What they can’t do is plan three years ahead without knowing what the rules will be in three months. I wrote a while ago about what a fair society means, and looking from here I believe it even more: fairness and predictability are worth more than any tax incentive.
And one more thing: the polarised public debate, where you’re either “for” or “against”, with no room for nuance. From far away, it sounds even louder.
Staying connected
Leaving doesn’t mean cutting ties. I’m still involved in Romanian projects, I read the Romanian press every morning and I talk to people on my teams almost daily. Technology makes this incomparably easier than 15 years ago: video calls, group chats, shared documents. And there’s no time difference at all, since Cyprus is in the same time zone as Romania, which helps enormously.
What I’ve learned is that a connection doesn’t maintain itself. You have to feed it consciously: call for no reason, let people know when you’re coming, make concrete plans instead of “we’ll see each other sometime”. Good friendships survive distance, but only if both sides put in a little effort.
Being an expat is not running away
I want to be blunt here, because this idea bothers me. In Romania, leaving is often seen as betrayal or defeat: “he ran away”, “he left everything behind”. I don’t buy it. The world has changed. You can live in one country, work with clients in three others and stay deeply connected to the place where you were born.
Many of the Romanians who have left in recent years send money home, invest at home, and bring back experience, contacts and new ways of working. Some will return with a perspective they would never have gained if they had stayed. That’s not running away. It’s another, broader way of being Romanian.
Advice for anyone thinking of moving abroad
I get messages fairly often from people considering a move abroad. I don’t have a recipe, but there are a few things I’d tell anyone:
- Move towards something, not away from something. If the only reason is that you’re fed up, your problems will travel in your suitcase. Choose a country for what it offers, not just for what you leave behind.
- Keep your network. The people you know back home are huge capital. Don’t abandon them. They’ll be your partners, clients, advisers and, above all, your friends.
- Learn the local culture. Don’t lock yourself in a bubble of fellow expats. Find out how locals think, how business gets done, what’s polite and what isn’t. Respect opens doors.
- Do your maths honestly. Cost of living, taxes, schools, healthcare. Don’t rely on something you read on a forum.
- Give it time. The first months are full of excitement and small frustrations. Only after a year do you really know whether it’s your place.
One more thing: it isn’t permanent. You don’t have to decide today for the rest of your life. One of the things I’ve learned in more than 20 years as an entrepreneur is that reversible decisions should be made quickly, and moving to another country, however big it feels, is largely reversible.
Six months later
If you asked me today whether I’d make the move again, the answer is yes, without hesitation. I wake up a few minutes from the sea, I work with people from all over the world and I feel calmer than I have in a long time. As for missing my friends, I fix that with a plane ticket and a long dinner in Bucharest.
What do you think? If you’ve left your home country, what do you miss most? And if you stayed, what would have to change for your friends abroad to want to come back?