Why Sibiu ?  It's a great "feel good place" for me, and others say the same.  It's slow-paced but far from "dead".   Cultural things abound. In the States I couldn't afford the symphony.  Sibiu 's own symphony orchestra and the other European visiting orchestras are first class and an evening of professional music costs less than two dollars. There's live music everywhere, an arty cinema, theater, concerts in the piatas, art galleries, museums and bookstores.

The people are relaxed and have the time to chat. Romanians everywhere in the city speak English.  . The food is varied and delicious, both in the restaurants and in the shops and markets, and by American standards, incredibly cheap. The historical center is large and medieval and never ceases to stir my imagination and my eye for beauty and color.   There's lots of nature in the city itself—in fact there's a huge and well-used central park complete with kid's playground, rose garden, strategically placed benches for either people-watching or a private or public kiss, a very cool beer place, trails and birds and streams…and it all goes and goes, right out of town.   If you walk far enough through the woods you get to the Open Air Museum —also huge and natural and full of replicas of Romania 's traditional houses of wood and thatch.   I've got an annual pass (less than 10 euro) to enter and stroll to my heart's content, have a beer, a coffee or a meal surrounded by woods; fish or boat in the lake.  It's open 12 months of the year.

I have lots of good ideas in the States.  But here my ideas have a better chance of being truly new, innovative and needed by a culture too long stifled and not yet totally on-board the entrepreneurial train.   Sibiu (and Romania in general) is an important station on that train and anyone with good ideas has a chance to make a rewarding and exciting life here, as well as an important contribution.  

Ah but yes, my first love, the surrounding traditional villages. Leaving both modern and beautifully quaint Sibiu, it is possible to go backwards in time by 500 years in about 20 minutes or less by car (and on reasonably good roads! Obviously none of those Brits had visited Sibiu or Brasov or Bucharest !).   Horse-drawn carts piled with hay, pitch-forks and a shawl-clad wife perched a-top are a common sight  on country roads, tall fur hats, scarves, cows and goats in the courts of houses, cheese-making, feed-growing, hand-hewn tools, water still being pulled up from bountiful wells by metal buckets on chains, toilets in wooden sheds in yards—many remarkably clean and picturesque (but not all), smiling and happy aged faces and singing children.   All in a landscape of emerald green or chimney smoke and white, rolling hills, snow-covered peaks, pine forests and rivers and wild flowers that take your breath away. On my first visit to the countryside I knew that I had found "home" in Sibiu .

So I'm here in Romania for the foreseeable future.   What do I do with my time? Walk in the hills and villages of course, sit in the cafes with new and interesting Romanian friends, communicate by internet with people from other countries who want to come to Romania , helping them to understand the real-estate market and learn the finer points of buying property here in Sibiu . I help them to make the move to investing in this hot European real estate market.   Best of all, I introduce visitors to the traditional villages around Sibiu .  We take all-day hikes and visit different kinds of villages, We visit old hand painted churches on the hills that can literally stop you in your tracks.   It may be the 21st century in nearby Sibiu , but here in the villages you've entered a time-machine, complete with the clop of huge hoofs and the parade of cows strolling to their respective houses after a day grazing in the hills.   And if you "have the magic" you may hear the grinding of the wooden wheels of the hand-painted hearse as smoke-puffing draft horses pull it up the cobbles towards the candle-lit, incense-filled tiny church a-top the the hill in the misty morning, to the steady beat of home-made drums, chants and church bells.