Episode 7: Why I Chose Prague As My Digital Nomad Base

This week, the podcast features Global Intelligence Letter Editor Jeff D. Opdyke.

An early adopter of the digital nomad lifestyle, Jeff began working remotely long before the COVID pandemic boosted working-from-home into the mainstream. And having that head-start gave him opportunities for travel and expat living—combined with a steady job—that the rest of the world is slowly beginning to become aware of.
 
In a nutshell—why continue with commuting to the city, getting stuck in traffic, or working from an office-building cubicle when you could be doing your day job from a tropical beach town, a mountain retreat, a cute European village…or anywhere you please?
 
Being a digital nomad lets you choose your location, rather than letting your work choose it for you. And with that comes additional benefits. For example, you could halve your living expenses by moving to a location with a lower cost of living, while still earning a First-World wage. And that’s an instant upgrade on your lifestyle.

There is a catch, though. Not every country in the world is happy to allow expats to simply waltz in, set up their laptop, and stay as long as they like. In fact, some countries don’t like that idea at all.
 
On the other hand, there are other, more enlightened countries, where roaming Westerners with portable incomes are seen as a valuable resource. In this episode of Bigger Better World, Jeff D. Opdyke talks us through the ins and outs of taking your work with you…around the globe.
 
Settle in, press play, and find out as we welcome you to the latest episode of International Living’s Bigger Better World podcast.

If you haven’t become a member yet—you can do it today with a special discount offer for podcast listeners. You’ll receive our monthly magazine plus a bundle of special extras, including our 2023 Global Retirement Index. Subscribe here: https://intliving.com/podcast.

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Transcript

Jim Santos 0:10 

Hello, everyone. I'm Jim Santos, and this is Bigger, Better World from International Living. In this podcast series, we introduce you to a bigger world, full of communities that are safe, welcoming, beautiful, and largely undiscovered. A better world. A friendly, warm, great value world where you can live richer, travel more, invest for profit, and enjoy a better life. We talked with our writers and other people just like you who took a chance and followed our guidance to create for themselves bigger, better lives all around the world. Let's get to it. 

Welcome to the show, everyone. You know, most people associate International Living with overseas retirement, and that's certainly a major topic. However, here on Bigger, Better World, we want to remind you that there are other compelling reasons for living or just experiencing extended travel overseas. Today's episode is a good example and on a topic that strikes a personal chord with me. When I began my life in Ecuador back in 2013, I was not retired. I was working, in fact, 40 to 50 hours a week remotely providing computer and networking services to offices across the USA. Then, of course, in recent years, COVID has showed us that remote work is a real option for many, and some employers have discovered it's a great way to retain employees, reduce sick leave, and generally increase productivity.

Once you've made that leap, sooner or later you may realize that with the Internet and modern communications, working remotely can take on a bigger, better meaning. Our guest today, Jeff Opdyke, is an expert on the digital nomad lifestyle. Jeff is the editor of the Global Intelligence Letter and a contributor to International Living magazine. We're catching up to Jeff today in Prague—capital and largest city in the Czech Republic. Jeff, welcome to Bigger, Better World, and thanks for joining us.

Jeff Opdyke 2:08 

Hey, no problem. Thanks for being here.

Jim Santos 2:10 

All right, so, Jeff, why don't we start the show here with you, giving us a little bit of your background. Where did you come from and how did you end up in the Czech Republic?

Jeff Opdyke 2:17 

So, yeah, I spent like, 17 years as a writer for The Wall Street Journal in their in their investment in sort of personal finance area. I was moving around from Dallas to Seattle to the Mothership in New York, and, you know, I was doing the Hurlington Street column, which is probably the most famous column in investment journalism, and moved across to their personal finance division when they opened the Personal Journal section years ago. And I spent 17 years doing that. 

But I had an opportunity at one point to go to work for one of the other Agora divisions called the Sovereign Society, which is now, I think, Banyan Publications, whatever they call it. And for seven or eight years, I was traveling the world as the economics guy, checking in on central banks around the world and gold and currencies and investment opportunities from Uruguay to Switzerland, to Thailand. I was all over Asia writing about investment opportunities. And at one point International Living calls up and says, ‘Hey, how about you find a place to live in Europe that you like and you write for us?’ And it's like, hey, somebody's going to pay me to live in Europe.

Jeff Opdyke 3:34 

Done deal.

Jim Santos 3:35 

But what was your background in finance?

Jeff Opdyke 3:37

Basically the journal. I mean, my degree at university is journalism, but I was always interested in the investment side of the world because my dad, before he retired, was one of the high ranking poohbahs at one of the Anheuser-Busch divisions called Eagle Snacks. And then it became Earth Grains, et cetera. But he was a high ranking poobah there. And when I was probably in 9th grade, I'm going to guess it was, I was visiting him in St. Louis and he just handed me a publication called Value Line, which is a publication that puts out stock research on things like 5000 companies every quarter, or whatever it is. I went through that and I began building my own little Excel spreadsheet on how to analyze companies. It was that that got me hired by the Wall Street Journal. So my background is journalism, but my passion has always been sort of understanding the investment market.

Jim Santos 4:36 

Yeah, I'm an Excel junkie myself. I have a spreadsheet for everything, so I can feel you on that. So how did you end up in Prague?

Jeff Opdyke 4:45 

When IL told me, hey, pick a place to live in Europe, I went sort of poking around. I'd been to Europe many, many times. My mom worked for the airline industry, for a string of international airlines when I was a kid. So I used to fly for free all over the world.

Jim Santos 5:01 

Nice.

Jeff Opdyke 5:02 

And I've been to many parts of Europe. I've at this point seen, I don't know, 57, 58% of Europe, according to my little travel app that I have. So I knew going in that there were certain things that I wanted in a place to live. And Prague fit all those things. It's got four seasons, it's got a great mass transit network. I don't have to have a car, which reduces, you know, huge expense, central Europe, and the tax rate is fabulous. So I just, you know, this, this really fit the lifestyle I wanted.

Jim Santos 5:34 

Yeah, it sounds like a beautiful city. I see that it dates back to the fifth century. So the history, the arts, architecture there must really be incredible.

Jeff Opdyke 5:43 

Yeah. I live in what's called Prague 2, one of the sort of subdivisions of Prague. It's one or two metro stops from the dead center of Old Town. I'm looking at my little rooftop windows here. I live on the top floor of an apartment building. And I'm looking out at apartment buildings that date to the 17th and 18th century and they look brand new, but I mean, it's clear that they're really ancient. The whole city's ancient. The whole city was never bombed in World War II. Hitler wanted to use it as a sort of an amusement park, theme park for his pan-Germania kind of thing, so he never bombed it. So it still has all its history going back, at least the architectural structures going back to the year 1000 in some cases. It's a really beautiful place.

Jim Santos 6:31 

Yeah, I think for most Americans when they go to Europe the first time, that's what's most amazing to them is that we have a history of a few hundred years. We think that's really good. And then you go to Europe and like you say, here's a building that's been here for 1000 years.

Jeff Opdyke 6:45 

Yeah, it's pretty incredible. I mean, some of the restaurants and pubs that I go to have been around since before the U.S. even existed, which is just before the Pilgrims arrived. It's just pretty incredible to pop into a place to eat and you look around and you think, man, there have been people here that have been eating since the 13th century and it's just sort of ridiculous.

Jim Santos 7:09 

Now you were kind of ahead of the curve on working remotely. Now, post COVID, it's a very popular topic, but it seems like you were doing this even when you were working for The Wall Street Journal.

Jeff Opdyke 7:19 

Yeah, I, you know, I, I joked with people during the whole COVID thing, you know, because everybody was like, ‘Oh my God, I'm locked up in my house and blah, blah, blah.’ And it's like, ‘Man, I've been doing this for 20 years, this is nothing’. So even at the Journal in the early 2000s, I had an opportunity to work from home in South Louisiana, even though the Journal is clearly based in New York City. But I was working from home from the early 2000s. So, you know, COVID comes along and, you know, it's, it's easy sailing for me. It wasn't even a hiccup for me. It was the same thing as I've experienced every day for, you know, the last 20 years of my life. But yeah, you know, like this whole digital nomad thing really kind of sprang out of COVID You know, prior to COVID, somebody like me was a rarity and most bosses did not like having somebody working from home. And working from home was clearly seen as some sort of bohemian lifestyle slacker. Yeah, like a slacker lifestyle. People would always say, yeah, how much work are you really doing?

Jeff Opdyke 8:24 

But the question, the reality is that when you are a work from home person, you wake up every Tuesday thinking, I'm going to get fired today. So you really bust your butt to prove that your value were working from home. But it was COVID that really sort of changed the landscape because you had to have everybody working from home legally, basically to keep your business running and you couldn't bring them into the office. So this whole work from home lifestyle sprang up from that and a lot of people realize, hey, I can be just as productive working from home and I have a better work life balance. And so you've seen this lifestyle really become much more commonplace. 

There's sort of two versions of this lifestyle in the digital nomad world. I mean, there's a lot of people who are not nomadic. I mean, they're working from home, from the home they've lived in, in Des Moines, Iowa for 20 years. But there are others who have sort of taken this thing to heart and become true digital nomads. And you know, they're the ones who are running around the world, spending time in Thailand here in Malaysia, there in Argentina over there, and just sort of bopping around the world constantly based upon largely how long a tourist visa lasts.

And then there are some of us who are more permanent. I have a long term residence visa for the Czech Republic, which means I am effectively a permanent resident here. But I use my ability to live and work anywhere, to travel all the time. I've been to 13 or 14 countries since May. And just as an example, when I was over the summer, I really wanted to see Oman, a part of the Middle East I've never been to. And I wanted to pop over next door and see a buddy of mine who lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. So I just took off for a couple of weeks and I went and toured Oman and played around in Saudi Arabia. And I had all my deadlines and nothing changed with my work life every day. And I met all my deadlines just traveling. 

And you sort of do that by playing whenever you want and then working whenever you want. So sometimes I will work till midnight, 01:00 in the morning, and I willingly do that because the lifestyle means that I can play all during the day and go see really cool things from 10:00 in the morning till 4:00 in the afternoon when I'm not working. But then I'll work at night and get all my deadlines done. It's a great lifestyle as far as I'm concerned.

Jim Santos 10:48 

I had a similar experience, started working remotely, first part-time and then full-time. I started around 2008 and at the time, as you say, it was really difficult to convince your boss that I'm not going to be sitting at home in my underwear watching TV, I'm actually going to be working. But after a short amount of time, there were two of us doing it at the time. They looked over the stats and founded out the two of us were doing 80% of the work. The rest of the staff was handling that other 20%. So I think COVID also taught people that you can be productive at home. It reduces the number of sick days that your employees take, and you get better employee retention because they like the working environment. So I guess what has really changed, you've been doing this for 20 years. The technology must certainly be a lot different now from when it was when you were first working from Louisiana.

Jeff Opdyke 11:35 

Yeah, you know, it's one of the things that has made this lifestyle even more efficient is the iPhone or the smartphone in general. You know, when I started doing this, I had to carry laptops around with me, and I still carry my laptop today. But the point being that if I'm traveling in 2003 or 2004, I can't really whip a laptop out in the middle of a cab ride somewhere, or it becomes a bit of a challenge. But with a smartphone, I have the ability to write on my phone, and I write on my phone all the time. And so there was a point where I was in Lebanon and I was in the Beka’ah valley going to see some wineries, and it was probably an hour and a half drive, and I'm in the back of this cab riding the entire time while the cab driver is driving through the Beka’ah valley in Lebanon. Or when I'll go to dinner here in Prague with my wife, we'll go walking around just during the day or whatever, and I swipe my phone out all the time. And I can't tell you how many stories, like full stories I have written, just thumbing it out on my iPhone.

So that technology has made life incredibly easier and high-speed. Internet and WiFi and that kind of stuff has really made life incredibly easy to be a digital nomad. I've written from coffee shops all over the world. I've written from trains all over the world. Airplanes, airports, you name it. You can just write from anywhere because the technology makes it so easy to do.

Jim Santos 13:10 

So there was a time when to have a home office, you needed to have a fax machine and a fax line and a copy machine and a lot of equipment that's not really transportable.

Jeff Opdyke 13:18 

Yeah, exactly. And iPhone, honestly, it's incredible the amount of tasks you can do with an iPhone. Everything from creating a PDF to digitally manipulating pictures to run for stories and things like that. It's just that the iPhone is…if I only had one thing that I could use for the rest of my life to be a digital nomad, it would be my iPhone, because I can do everything with it.

Jim Santos 13:46 

Well, sure, you can add photos, add movies, record interviews.

Jeff Opdyke 13:49 

Yeah, right. I can do anything I want to do on my phone.

Jim Santos 13:52 

I wanted to talk about one of your articles, the Field Notes section of the February 22 edition of International Living called ‘Invisible elves and the world's best digital nomad visas’. Now, in that you talk about some of the different locations where you can be a digital nomad, and by that I guess you mean countries that have a visa specifically for people who want to come to the country to work, not coming there to retire or to gain full time residency?

Jeff Opdyke 14:17 

Yeah. So there's a lot of people who want to be quasi permanent digital nomads like me, and not sort of peripatetic souls bouncing from country to country to country every basically 90 days. You need a visa that allows you to live in the country, gives you residence rights within the country, not just a tourist visa, and not every country offers that. And particularly in Europe. 

Europe and Asia tend to be the two destinations that most Americans want to go to for sort of quasi permanent digital nomadism. And there's a lot of countries that people want to go to, they just can't go to. And, like, when I was looking to move to Europe, I really wanted to go to Edinburgh, Scotland, because I think Scotland is a really cool place, probably one of the most beautiful countries I've ever been to. But there's no option in the United Kingdom for a digital nomadic life. I mean, you can't get a visa to live and work in the UK as a freelancer, so that becomes a non-starter.

Jim Santos 15:30 

You just can't do it just different from a work visa. Like, if you had an employer who wanted to send you to England to work?

Jeff Opdyke 15:37 

Yeah, they're definitely different. Like, if you have an employer, like, I'm just going to randomly pick Coca Cola, and Coca Cola wants to send you to Scotland to work in their local division, they're handling all that for you. They're getting you a work visa and whatnot, and they're explaining to the Scottish government why, or the UK government, why you need a visa, et cetera. And that's fine. But if you just want to move randomly to Scotland on your own and say, hey, I'm going to be a freelance writer, freelance artist, graphic artist, whatever, they're not going to allow you to do that because there is no visa in place for that person. So you can't just randomly say, I'm going to Scotland to live there. You can't randomly say, I'm going to go to Poland and live there, or I'm going to go to Taiwan and live there. Pick a place. So you have to figure out which countries offer a digital, nomad visa, freelance visa, so that you can go and live in that particular country and have rights there and not get kicked out of the country.

Jim Santos 16:38 

You started the article with a country that usually does not spring to mind when people are thinking about moving there to work, and that was Iceland. So they just recently opened a digital visa or a digital work visa.

Jeff Opdyke 16:51 

Yeah, there's a lot of countries that have been doing that and Iceland is one that is sort of definitely not top of mind. I think it's cool that Iceland is doing that. I don't know that I would personally move to Iceland. And it has nothing to do with the weather, it has to do with the cost. I mean, Iceland is a very expensive place and I don't really want to spend a bunch of money on lifestyle and stuff like that.

Jim Santos 17:12 

Yeah, it seemed like they set a fairly high bar for becoming a digital nomad there.

Jeff Opdyke 17:17 

Yeah, they do. And it's because the cost of living there is so expensive, they want to ensure that you have the ability to afford life there. And that's pretty common in a lot of places. There's a lot of digital nomad visas that are they sort of spraying out of COVID almost as joke is the wrong word, but it's sort of a touristy gimmick, particularly in the Caribbean, because America is going to shut itself down and the Americans couldn't really go anywhere. They were banned from Europe and all these other places, but they weren't banned from a lot of these Caribbean countries. And those countries were basically saying, hey, tourism is dead, so let's find a way to bring some tourists in. Let's offer a digital nomad visa for all these Americans who now have the capacity to work from home, and we'll let them come here and live for six months or a year and then they can go back home. 

It became like a one year sabbatical at best from that spring. All of these really cool nomadic visas that are true visas now, like, Portugal has one that it just launched, Greece has one, et cetera, and they are truly for digital nomads who want to live and work in that country for long periods of time.

The one in in Portugal is good for one year, up to five years, and at the end of five years, you can actually apply for citizenship and a passport in Portugal. So that's a really useful digital nomad visa.

Jim Santos 18:39 

I see that you did mention Greece in that article. Could be a nomad there for up to one to three years.

Jeff Opdyke 18:44 

Yeah. And a lot of them are renewable. So you could be a nomad in Greece and you could keep renewing it until you reach the seven year mark, at which point you could apply for Greek citizenship, assuming you learned the Greek language to some degree, to pass the language test, since most countries do have some kind of language test requirement.

Jim Santos 19:04 

Yeah. The granddaddy so far seems to be Thailand. You mentioned they just opened a ten-year.

Jeff Opdyke 19:08 

Yeah, Thailand is pretty cool because that's one of the destinations. It's sort of a holy grail for digital nomad workers, because Thailand is such a beautiful place. You've got the gorgeous beaches, you've got the mountains up north. Bangkok is just the most active city in the world. It's just incredible how active that place is. Opportunities for everything you could possibly imagine in Bangkok. And because of that, you have a lot of people who do work as digital nomads. 

In Thailand, the challenge has been in the past that it was sort of a border jump kind of place. So every three months, or whatever it was, whenever your visa expired, you had to cross the border into another country, Malaysia or wherever, and you had to come back and get your passport stamped again for another three months. So you were always having to do border runs to live and work there. That has changed in that Thailand has announced a new, or has released now a new digital nomad visa that's good for ten years. So if you apply for it and you get it, and there is a financial requirement involved, you've got to earn $40,000 or so and you've got to prove your background and whatnot.

Jeff Opdyke 20:28 

And if you get it, then it's good for ten years. So you don't have to keep renewing this thing. Like most digital nomad visas, you have to renew every one to two years. With this one, it's good for ten years, which that's a long time to not have to worry about going through governmental paperwork.

Jim Santos 20:43 

Yeah, I can imagine there's quite a bit of paperwork for that.

Jeff Opdyke 20:45 

Yeah, all these digital nomad visas, there's just an abundance of paperwork you have to go through and it becomes sort of a hassle if you're doing it every year. I'm sort of lucky to a degree in Prague and that my residence visa is good for two years at a time. So every two years I've got to renew this thing.

Jim Santos 21:05 

It seems to me, looking at some of the requirements for this, that proof of income. If you're a freelancer, say, it can be very difficult to prove that you have even a steady income source. I mean, you could have months that are way over the limit. Months that are way under the limit. Is there any particular strategy for people who are working remotely but don't have a salary that they can point to that they can use to do this?

Jeff Opdyke 21:29 

Well, I mean, you're going to have to prove an income. If you work for a company and you're going to be a digital nomad, you're going to show them your paychecks. If you are a true freelancer, you're going to have to show them several months, a year worth of income, whatever it is, to prove that. In Thailand's case, you're going to have to show a year because they want to see what you earn on annual basis. So they're not going to care that in March you earned $8,000, and then in April you earned $3,700. They're not going to really pay attention to that. They're going to pay more attention to what you earn on an annual basis. And as long as you can prove through bank deposits or you can show from whatever it is that you're getting paid and how much you're getting paid, that's all they're going to care about.

Jim Santos 22:22 

I guess if you have problems with that kind of documentation, then you are looking at one of these bouncing situations that you talked about.

Jeff Opdyke 22:32 

Yeah, if you're going to struggle proving your income or proving that you meet whatever the income demands are, then, yeah, you're not going to get your visa wherever you want to go. Thailand is a little more expensive than most, but there's some that are incredibly cheap. You can go to Portugal, and it's like $2,800 a month. And if you decided to apply for the D7 visa, there's a couple of visas in Portugal. The digital nomad is the latest one, and it is sort of designed to take the place of the D7. The D7 is really a retirement visa. It's a passive income visa for retirees who want to move to Portugal. And a lot of freelancers were using it as a way to get into Portugal because all you had to do was prove something like $800 a month, which is that's not a lot for even a digital nomad to have to prove. 

So now they've gone and created an official digital nomad visa. And that one is about $,700, $2,800 a month, which I still think there's a lot of digital nomads who can prove that level of income. Now, when you get to some of the other ones, like the Caribbean, I think the Caymans might be like $100,000, which for some digital nomads is going to be a non-starter.

So you really have to pay attention to what the income requirements are and whether or not you're going to be able to prove that. And if you can't you still want to be a digital nomad, then you're really going to have to be a digital nomad who is truly nomadic and bouncing from country to country every time the tourist visa expires.

Jim Santos 24:10 

I understand some countries also require that you have money deposited in one of their banks.

Jeff Opdyke 24:15 

Yeah, I guess that's the case in some places. That tends to be relatively rare. Most of them want to see that you have deposits somewhere in your life. Like when I move to the Czech Republic, they require that I prove that I have a certain amount of income in a bank account. They didn't care where the bank account was, but they wanted proof of it. And that proof was actually from the banker himself who signed the document, and it was stamped on letterhead paper and it was notarized and all that kind of stuff. So they want to see documentary evidence that you do have a level of savings somewhere so that you can kind of support yourself in case your income runs dry for several months or whatever.

Jim Santos 24:58 

There was one other article that you wrote for International Living I wanted to bring up here. That was in the November 2022 issue, the best one-year visa option for living and working in Croatia.

Jeff Opdyke 25:08 

Yeah, Croatia is really interesting, actually, because I was there over the summer with my wife. We spent the summer sort of traveling. We were in Portugal in Spain and Morocco, and we ended the summer in Croatia, up on the Istrian Peninsula in northern Croatia, directly across from Venice. And it's a beautiful part of the country. It's very reminiscent of Tuscany in Italy. It's got very similar food, it's got very similar wine culture, the same kinds of grapes, et cetera. So it's a really cool place. 

I like Croatia a lot. And they have a digital nomad visa, but their digital nomad visa, honestly, is kind of a pain in the butt. Based upon the digital nomads I talk to because of the requirements. The paperwork requirements are a bit of a hassle, and you've got to just sort of jump through hoops that the digital nomads I talked to said they probably wouldn't try to jump through again, and it's only good for one year.

Jim Santos 26:07 

So you have to do it all over again.

Jeff Opdyke 26:08 

Exactly. But the easier way in is to basically rent an apartment. If you rent an apartment and you prove to the Croatian government that you've prepaid for one year, they will give you a visa to live in the country for a year. So why go through a one year digital nomad visa and all the hoops and you've got to jump through for that when you can just prove you've rented an apartment for a year and get in that way? And that's pretty much all you need to prove. Plus, show you have some health insurance, you can live and work in Croatia, which is a really beautiful place.

Jim Santos 26:41 

You pointed out in the article that they have a fairly high upfront cost for the visa.

Jeff Opdyke 26:45 

Yeah, the digital nomad stuff can be expensive. And again, I guess if you include the cost of an apartment as the upfront cost, then yeah, that's going to be expensive, too. You can find some really nice apartments in Zagreb, the capital, or in the Istrian Peninsula, and some of the cities there like Ravina that are really pretty, and they're going to cost you anywhere from $900 to as much as you want to pay. But let's just say it's $1,000. What you're going to pay, you're going to come up with $12,000 to prepay rent for a year. So there is a large upfront cost, a relatively large upfront cost. But that said, it's a way to live in a really beautiful country for a year as a digital nomad.

Jim Santos 27:39 

Well, the other way looking at that, though, is that you would have to pay that rent.

Jeff Opdyke 27:41 

Yeah, exactly. I mean, the only issue is that somebody paying $1,000 a month out of their income stream is one thing. Somebody coming up with 12 grand upfront is a different sort of hurdle for some people. I guess it just depends on how you look at it. But yeah, I mean, if you can if you can come up with the rent for the apartment that you want, I think that's a fantastic way to basically get to live and work in Europe for a year. I would use that as an opportunity to bounce around Europe and look at the countries that do offer the digital nomad visas where you might want to live more permanently. Like if you've never been to Portugal, you've never been to Spain or you've never been to Italy or Greece. To be able to go into Croatia and live a year in Croatia and use cheap airfare to bop around to the various countries I think is a great way to build your knowledge base of the various countries that you might want to live in more permanently.

Jim Santos 28:43 

Would you say that's the biggest advantage to moving your office overseas like that?

Jeff Opdyke 28:48 

The ability to bounce around from country to country?

Jim Santos 28:50 

Yeah, the ability to be able to explore other options and see other places?

Jeff Opdyke 28:54 

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I've done that even in Prague. As much as I love Prague, my wife and I have spent the last couple of years bouncing around all these other places. I've been to Portugal many times, and it was always…I had seen Lisbon, and I love Lisbon. Turns out my wife isn't the world's biggest fan of Lisbon, but she likes the Algarve a lot, down south. She likes the wine country a lot. So it gives you an opportunity to see parts of Europe that you just don't really see. 

I mean, like, when people go to, let's say, Germany, they're going to Frankfurt, they're going to Berlin, they're going to Munich, which are great. Those are fantastic cities. I particularly love Munich, but when you live in some place like Prague, I can hop on the train and I can go to Dresden or I can go to these other smaller cities around Germany that I've been to, and you get to see Germany from a different perspective. Or we went to Croatia. We were driving, so we rented a car in Prague and we drove to the Istrian peninsula, and we crossed through Slovenia and Istria, and on the way home, we went through northern Italy.

I would never have booked a flight to Udine in northern Italy. I mean, it's just sort of the Starkville Mississippi of Italy. It's not like, no offense against Starkville, but it's not like people in Europe are saying, ‘Oh, I've got to go to Mississippi and see Starkville’. It's the same thing with Italy. Most people go to Italy, they want to see Tuscany, they want to see Venice, they want to see Rome, Milan, et cetera. And for good reason. But when you get to drive, you see Europe a different way when it's sort of local for you. 

And I got to tell you, the Italian Alps north of Udine are some of the most beautiful mountains I have ever seen. And you're driving through on these perfect autobahns. Clearly the Germans have gone in there and built the freeway for the Italians. And you look around and I looked at my wife and I said, ‘I guarantee you that dragons live here’ just because of how stark and sharp and jagged these mountains were and how high they reached and the clouds were cutting through. It was a pretty amazing scene. And you're just not going to see that when you're going only to the major tourist attractions and tourist cities. So when you live in Europe and you get to go to all these sort of secondary and tertiary places, you get a different feel for the continent.

Jim Santos 31:17 

Yeah. After living in Ecuador for six years and traveling around parts of South America from there as a base, my wife and I also reached the same conclusion that part of the big expense of visiting someplace in Europe is getting to and from Europe. So once you're there, you might as well stay as long as you can and see as many different places as you can.

Jeff Opdyke 31:35 

Right, exactly. Again, when you live in America and you're a Europhile and you want to come to Europe frequently, when you decide, hey, I'm going to go to Italy again, people are going to fly to Rome and they're going to fly to Venice and they're going to go see Milan and they might go down south and see the Amalfi coast and all these things. But there's not a lot of people that are going to go to the tertiary cities and go driving between Udine and southern Austria because there's just not enough time on their ten day agenda or their two week agenda to do that. 

I just think when you live somewhere, you have all these really cool opportunities to see different parts of the country that you're just rarely going to see. And I had that experience recently. It was with International Living doing a story in Portugal down in the Algarve, and International Living has done a ton of stories on the Algarve over the years, but it's always been sort of the popular parts of the Algarve, Lagos and Albufeira and, you know, all these places that everybody goes. It's really popular for the tourist crowd.

I decided to go way off onto the far southwest corner to a little city called Sagres. It's literally at the bottom of Portugal. You can't go any farther without ending up in the ocean. It's a population of 2,000 people, and I think that's just hopeful thinking. It's clearly not 2,000 people. It might have seven or eight paved roads. That's it. It's not a place people tend to go to because when you're on vacation, you're going to go to the places that are populated. You have the restaurants and the resort hotels and the sandy beaches and things like that you want when you live here and you go to Portugal numerous times, you can decide, hey, I'm going to go see this other corner of Portugal nobody goes to and you get a whole different experience. It's really cool.

Jim Santos 33:36 

Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. There's a huge difference between vacationing someplace and actually living there. You get such a broader and more realistic picture of what life is like in that country when you're actually experiencing.

Jeff Opdyke 33:47 

Yeah, and that's the thing I really liked about moving to Europe and moving to Prague in general, specifically. Because I'd been to Prague before and I had spent most of my time all of my time running around Old Town Prague which is where everybody wants to go because that's, you know, sort of the cultural center of the city and where other restaurants are and the shops and the shows and, you know, it's really close to the Prague Castle, et cetera, et cetera. 

And when I was first going to move here, I was thinking, well, I want to live in Old Town. And then I got here and I was having a conversation with a real estate agent and she goes like, look, I know why you want to live in Old Town. All the Americans and all the foreigners that come across want to live in Old Town. But the reality is you're going to hate living there because it's always crowded, it's always loud, there's always tourists. And it's so true. There's only about four days a year when there's not tourists in Prague. Otherwise it's always crowded with people. And so she showed me this Prague 2 area, which is where all the expats live. Really beautiful. And like I said, it's like 17th, 18, 19th century buildings all over the place. It's very leafy parks all over the place. And it's a part of Prague that most tourists just are never going to see because they're going to be focused on Old Town for good reasons because that's where the Charles Bridge is in the Prague Castle and the Jewish Quarter and all that kind of fun stuff. But out here it's real Prague and it's incredibly beautiful. I mean, I would say it's equally as beautiful as Old Town, just a lot different. 

Jim Santos 35.30

You had a couple of decades of experience with travel before you took up living abroad. What do you think would be the biggest challenge for somebody who's just looking at this and has never left the United States before?

Jeff Opdyke 35:33 

Well, I think the challenge is coming to grips with the idea that you're not going to be around everything, you know, as normal as in the U.S. If you move to somewhere like, let's say, London or Dublin, that's going to be sort of an eye opener for you. But that's sort of tame compared to when you're moving to a place like Prague or if you're moving to Croatia or even Germany because the culture really is so much more different than you are accustomed to in America. So that becomes a challenge for a lot of people. 

And a lot of people, a lot of Americans in particular, we grew up a certain way and we do things a certain way, and the rest of the world doesn't necessarily do things the same way. And so our expectations are at one level and the reality of living somewhere is going to be different than your expectation. And a lot of people get frustrated by that. They expect when you walk into a restaurant for it —to use a really goofy example—they expect you walk into a restaurant, somebody's going to seat you and show you where to sit.

Well, in Europe, that's not the case. You walk into a restaurant, you just look around and you go find a place to sit and you look to make sure there's no little reservation card on it. And then they come find you and they'll take your order, but it's not going to be within the first 30 seconds. It could take several minutes, five minutes, ten minutes before they get around to you. And then after you've had your meal, people in America, they're used to the wait staff coming over and asking, ‘Hey, are you ready for your bill?’ And they sort of want to turn the table quickly and you go and you leave. Well, in Europe, I could go to a restaurant, I could sit down, I could order a beer. I could write for an hour and a half before they even come check on me again. And then I'll raise my hand and say, hey, can I order a meal? And I'll order whatever I want to eat. And then I'll finish eating and I'll get another beer and I could be in that place for five hours and they would never come touch me, they would never talk to me, they wouldn't say anything to me.

And Americans would be like, hey, they're waiting for somebody to bring them the bill. They don't realize they have to get up and go sort of find the person or just walk out to the checkout place and pay for the bill there. So there are just things that you aren't accustomed to that a lot of people get frustrated by because that's just not the way it's done in America. And a lot of people basically return home because they're just frustrated by a process that is very different than what they are accustomed to.

Jim Santos 38:06 

I remember we had a waiter in Italy once who was borderline offended because we'd only been there an hour and a half and we were asking for the check. You haven't had coffee, you haven't had an effort to dinner, wine, you haven't asked me about desserts….

Jeff Opdyke 38:19 

Yeah. So it's a really different culture and I think you have to come to grips with your life is going to be very different than what you know it as back in America, you're not going to find the same kinds of products and things like. I can't tell you how much I've missed Pop Tarts. I finally found a place that sells them in Prague. But there's things that you just can't find all the time. There are certain times of the year I can't find celery. There are certain ingredients I just can't find in Prague. Like, I use ground sage when I'm cooking. I can't find ground sage very easily in Prague. So there are things that you just aren't going to be able to do in foreign countries that you're accustomed to. 

In America, I can't walk into a pharmacy and find the same kinds of medicines that I'm accustomed to that I know work for me, and you can't find those here. And that becomes a bit of a challenge. And then when I go home, I load up on this stuff. I was back home a couple of months ago for an International Living conference in Atlanta, and I went to South Louisiana to see my kids. And as goofy as this sounds, one of the things I loaded up on was cinnamon sugar, because I like cinnamon sugar on my toast and you can't find that anywhere in Prague. So I loaded up on cinnamon sugar and a bunch of medicines that you can't find here. 

So you just come to grips with certain things that are different, but those become charming aspects of living abroad, because by the same token, I get to wake up every morning and walk through one of the world's most beautiful cities. And it's always new to me every day because I spent so many years as an American, 56 years or 52 years in America. In the last four I've been in Prague. And even then, even now, things are still new to me.

Jim Santos 40:11 

When we were living in Ecuador, every time we'd visit the United States, we'd put a suitcase inside another suitcase, and then on the way back, that second suitcase would be full of spices like Old Bay Spice and, like you're saying, all the things that you can't get in that country. So you become very good at muling back and forth.

Jeff Opdyke 40:28 

Yeah, exactly. You become a pack mule for all these American items that you want.

Jim Santos 40:32 

I do always try to tell expats, and by the way, I think I was at that same conference in Atlanta, it's a shame we didn't run into each other, but always tried to tell people were thinking about the expat lifestyle that you have to keep in mind that you have to change for the country. The country is not going to change for you. And if you can't do that, yeah.

Jeff Opdyke 40:48 

I think that is the biggest issue that defines whether or not you're going to succeed or fail as an expat living overseas. If you can accept the fact that life is not going to be identical to what you know back at home, and it's going to be very different in many ways. And if those differences are going to freak you out and going to make you sort of frustrated and upset that you can't do things the way you did back home, then you're just not going to survive overseas. And I don't mean that in a mean or negative way. I'm just sort of being honest and truthful. You're just not going to survive because the world isn't going to change for you overseas because, ‘Oh, I’m an American, I've got to do it this way.’ They don't care. You're in their jungle and it's their laws that apply to the jungle, and you either accept their laws or you leave the jungle.

Jim Santos 41:42 

One other thing I wanted to bring up here you are the editor of the Global Intelligence Letter. Just wonder if you could take a moment to tell our listeners what that's about.

Jeff Opdyke 41:50 

Yeah, so I write Global Intelligence Letter and it is a monthly publication basically looking at investment opportunities that tend to be focused more globally as opposed to just sort of New York Stock Exchange kind of stuff. Or American companies. Like, I'm not going to recommend somebody go buy Apple Computer or Tesla or anything like that because it really doesn't have a huge global issue. I mean, sure, they're sold global, but they're still American companies doing sort of American things. I'm going to tell people about opportunities in other kinds of companies that are based overseas and are benefiting from local trends or even larger global trends.

Like, we own a Norwegian fertilizer maker, one of the largest fertilizer makers in the world, and it's sort of the play off of the commodity super cycle that's underway. But it's a way to play it through the Norwegian market where we found more value than we would have found in, say, the U.S. Market where certain fertilizer plays are widely known. So it's those kind of opportunities we look for in Global Intelligence. And we have a daily e-letter called Field Notes that runs, I think it's Monday to Saturday, and I think we have a Sunday digest that comes out and I write those five times a week.

And it's just sort of my take on what's going on in the world with the stocks, with global trends in central banks and gold purchases, in cryptocurrency kind of stuff and in NFTs or these nonfungible tokens that are popular these days, economic issues, the Federal Reserve, interest rates. So it's just a globalized look at investment opportunities and a daily e-letter on all the things that are sort of defining investment news those days.

Jim Santos 43:50 

And where can you find the Global Intelligence Letter?

Jeff Opdyke 43:52 

It's online, Globalintelligenceletter.com, I believe it is.

Jim Santos 43:56 

We've been chatting with Jeff Opdyke, International Living contributor and editor of the Global Intelligence Letter, currently talking the talk and walking the walk as a digital nomad in Prague. If you'd like more information on this subject, you can find Field Notes, a free e-newsletter of Jeff's, at Intliving.com/fieldnotes. 

Thank you again for taking the time to talk to me on Bigger, Better World.

Jeff Opdyke 44:22 

Hey, Jim, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Jim Santos 44:34 

The Bigger, Better World podcast is the production of International Living. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. If you have an idea for an episode or a question you'd like us to answer, email us at mailbag@internationalliving.com. And don't forget to put podcast in the subject line of your email. That's mailbag@internationalliving.com. 

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Jim Santos 45:44 

I'm Jim Santos for International Living, and I'll see you next week when I'll take you halfway around the globe to the island of Penang in Malaysia to chat with our Malaysian correspondent, Keith Hockton. So until next time, remember, there's a bigger, better World waiting for you.