Transplants by Laura Peruchi - Conversations With Women Thriving Abroad #23 From the Belgian Dream to Off-Grid Freedom | AnnSophie Salomez | Belgium → New Zealand
AnnSophie Salomez had what many would call a perfect life in Belgium: steady jobs, a renovated house, pets, stability. It was the Belgium dream, as she describes.
But although life looked perfect on paper, a quiet question kept coming back while she was living her life between traffic jams and long workdays: there must be more to life than this.
So, she and her husband got reconnected with old dreams and decided to plan a move to another country. The destination: New Zealand. A place so far away from home would be a guarantee to a fresh start, right?
The hard truth is that 20,000 kilometers away didn’t magically fix everything.
It took years for them to realize that escaping a place doesn’t automatically change who you are. Eventually, that realization led them back to a dream they had buried long ago — building an off-grid life in a tiny house, surrounded by nature.
In this episode, she talks about what led them to move, how they chose New Zealand, choosing authenticity over conformity and why freedom is often an internal shift before it’s a physical one.
Connect with Sophie:
Why the name “Transplants”?
I've always loved the meaning this word can have. To be a transplant is to carry one life while learning to live another.
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