Facing Europe - Eine Reise ins junge Europa

Romania and Bulgaria are neglected members of the European Union ever since their joining. Word was even of “second class EU citizens”. German media hardly ever report about European countries further east than Poland or the Czech Republic. Concerning Romania and Bulgaria it’s a lot of stereotypes. Bulgaria? Cheap holidays! Romania? That’s where Dracula’s from, isn’t it?
Our aim is to establish new perspectives in the reporting about Romania and Bulgaria – young perspectives. We want to meet people and talk to them about their hopes and fears. We won’t be completely by ourselves on our travels. There will be young Bulgarian and Romanian journalists joining us. Our colleagues will help us to get in touch with people and will translate whenever it seems necessary. And they will also show us their countries from their very own perspectives. Together we will tell stories – written, in photographs, sounds and videos. They will be published in our blog and in German, Rumanian and Bulgarian media. By the end of our journey, our two teams will meet at the only bridge over the river Danube that connects Bulgaria and Romania.

Our goal for Facing Europe is to tell enthralling stories. Since we want to share our experiences with you, we will be blogging daily. The use of different media is supposed to leave behind an impression and make the abstract idea of Europe a little more tangible.
In Romania, we will range the Carpathian Mountains with the last remaining wandering shepherds, inquire about the gold rush in Transylvania and explore the young subculture of Bucharest. In Bulgaria we will visit unique nature reserves that try to fight back mass tourism, go to the new bridge being built between Romania and Bulgaria with help of the EU and travel to Bulgaria’s border to Turkey, which is about to become Europe’s new rampart against immigration from non EU countries.
Our target audience includes everyone that worships the European Thought, just as we do, and loves the possibility of travel without boundaries; people who are annoyed with the omnipresent words of “euro crisis” and who are curious about what’s going on offside the big players in the EU.

Our project is about mobile, modern and good journalism. For the last months we have been feverishly preparing our journey and have done a lot of research. We don’t want this to have been in vain. That is why we got in touch with foundations, wrote countless overtures and applied for fellowships. We scrabbled our way through the EU application jungle and were sent from pillar to post. What we earned from that was a lot of appreciation, but no money except a little grant from the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation Leipzig.
Unfortunately, independent journalism is never for free. Even though we try to keep the spendings on a minimum and defray parts of the costs ourselves, we need you guys for the rest. In spite of travelling with public transport or tramping and couch surfing whenever we can: we’re six people on a four-week-trip, so travelling to and fro as well as getting around and keeping us nurtured will sum up to something.
We believe that our project will help to fill up two blank spots on the European map with some colour – and are grateful for any of your support!

The donations we receive are exclusively spent on our travel costs. Those sum up to about 8.000€, including a 500€ expense allowance for each of our Romanian and Bulgarian companions, because we feel that their translation work will cost a lot of effort. The Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation will grant us 1.000€ - the rest will have to be covered by us and we still try to find sponsors for the project.