Romania’s portrayal as both safe and exotic, as freed from its aberrant past and yet not fully Western, continues to appeal to nomadic fantasy. During the winter of 2018, I sat down in a fancy coffee shop with a German digital nomad, Fabian, who founded a geospatial data firm in 2007 in Cluj, which has since expanded to San Francisco, Detroit, Berlin, and China. As he sipped a green tea latte, he described Cluj’s appeal. ­After college, he began dabbling in Berlin politics but found it boring. He then realized that the one thing that would never bore him was entrepreneurship. Attracted to the “the wild east of ­Europe,” he considered Romania, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. It became a toss-up between Cluj and Sofia, as he wanted to remain in the eu and as Bucharest was “too ­political.” Cluj won ­because of the plethora of cheap flights between the city and Berlin. While his employees d idn’t earn much at first, now they make three times as much as doctors in the region, competing within an international market. His international travels are nonstop, and he even owns an apartment in San Francisco that he rarely visits. It’s a ­great life, but he’s thinking of selling his share and starting something new soon, just for fun.