Digital Nomad - Maikel Martens

Speaker 1: Hi, uh I 'm Michael. Uh I work at for uh digits. Uh before I worked for at for digit, I was in a digital nomad. I'm going to tell you something about a nomad. I'm talking about digital nomad, van life, and my own experience. So what is a nomad? I think most people know what a nomad is, but just briefly uh it's a people that are going from place to place for their animals and they don't have a uh uh living area that uh a f and permanent residence. So and digital nomad the only uh thing that they have in common is they do not have an uh residential area uh and digital nomad uses the digital

Speaker 1: skills to work online remotely and uses that skills to uh yeah travel the world because Yeah, remote jobs you can work from everywhere where you have internet. So one way of doing that is uh Van Life. Uh van life people are living in a van, but it's not only vans, it can also be in a a bus, a camper, or a truck. Vanlife is something that is very popular in America. Most of the times, not because they uh like it, but because there's the only option they have. So that's a little bit sad. But in the last few years it becomes very popular with younger generations because younger generations want to try to travel the world, so they combined van life

Speaker 1: with a digital nomad to travel the world for three years. So that is something that I did for three and a half years. For a half year I lived in uh Vancouver, Canada. When I came back to Europe, I built my van. And I traveled to Europe for some time. Only the first year was pleasurable because then the COVID hit , a lot of restrictions, a lot of things were closed. Police didn't like that I was moving a lot, so not the best time. I uh built my van in like one month. Two months uh working on it full time. Uh I had some little

Speaker 1: few requirements. It needs to be in automatic because I like to drive. Easy. I don't want to change everything. Like I everything in the bus needs to be ready to go. I don't want to every morning make wake up my bed of Put my better way, it needs to be all fixed. And it has to have enough power because sometimes you need to work a whole day, so you need to have enough power for that. So I found this The inside other pictures and the orange uh post an L van is uh it's cheaper because no company wants an orange van and I can find it easily if I when I park it somewhere so it's a win-win So uh the bus was equipped with uh 600 watt of solar power on the roof. For most of the times it was uh enough power, but in some cases, like when I was in up

Speaker 1: Norway then In the end of autumn, uh it was not enough. It also had uh a connection to the car engine. Uh so in that case if you are driving it will charge the battery. In the case of Norway I have to uh run the engine for an hour to full up the battery again to uh work. So this was the end result after uh all the work. One and a half months. Um, and it had a toilet on the left seat, under this left seats, and you can convert the between the seats and then a shower. And then the back uh under the bed was enough room for extra storage it could even fit uh my mountain bike and I've got a pretty big bike because of my height. So This lifestyle had made it possible for me to uh

Speaker 1: stay and work at very beautiful locations. But not always. Most of the time she's always standing on a supermarket park park or somewhere in a street. Especially when you're near cities because in cities there's not a lot of nice places to stay. So if you like I I would suggest take a look at it and maybe try it. It's really fun. Maybe on the covert this I hope that the covert is over because covert sucks within a fan life. So any questions

Speaker 1: I I think that in a few years everything going to be electric and I'm like what do I I can now s and the like l last year and this year the the prices of campers were really high so I was like I'm just gonna sell it and If you want to do it again I will just bu uh uh build a new one, but then fully electric.

Speaker 2: No, I guess that's it. All right.