Hotel Living

 There's something enchanting and yes, exotic, about the idea of hotel living in a foreign country. I'm sure that with a different title, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel would not have been such a huge hit.

When Bruce and I began our expat journey twelve years ago, it was because of a hotel. Our son-in-law had this property that had been in his family for years, although no one had done anything with it. 

He and my daughter invested their resources, he did the work and finally it was ready. They only lacked a trusted manager. Enter her dad, the most trusted manager imaginable. The full story of this enterprising adventure is told in my book, We Burned Our Boats.

This is the hotel. Who would not want to live here? Located near Lake Atitlan in the Guatemala highlands, where tourists come from all over the world, the area is known for its perfect weather year-round.

This photo shows the second and third floor, where the rooms are. The first floor is entry, lobby, and a small kitchen at the back.

We lived in the hotel for a couple months. My husband didn't enjoy it since he hated living where he worked, feeling unable to get away and relax. Also, the rooms were quite small for a big guy accustomed to a large family home in America. He liked working in his little office up front but not living upstairs.

He was not enchanted by this exotic opportunity.

Guests

My favorite thing as an expat is when family comes to visit and share in the treasures and pleasures of your new country. When we lived in Guatemala we had so many visitors and returned  sooften for one reason or another, that we rarely went three months without seeing various family members. It felt like the best of all worlds.

When I decided to settle in Veracruz, Mexico, I rented a large house specifically with guests in mind. "You can stay at my house. The beach is a ten-minute walk. There's a taco stand across the street." 

And so they came,

And came

And came

And came

Sometimes without their families

Even my sisters came. After wearing shorts and flip flops all week, our last night together we dressed for dinner at a nice restaurant. I have such pretty sisters.

Foreign, Foreigner

 I'm not sure what kind of person it takes who will leave everything familiar and beloved, like family, to go live in a foreign land. To be a foreigner, where you don't really fit in. You may speak and understand the language but not like a native. Where, by nature of the many differences, you will live in relative isolation, despite the friendliness of strangers.

I've asked myself this question many times. What is wrong with me that I'm okay with this? That even at home in America among my loved ones, I long to return to Mexico? 

Sometimes I think it might be because it's where Bruce and I were so happy, before he got sick in America and died.

 I do feel close to him here. I wish he were with me. Sometimes I think he is. 

The Expat: What and Why

 Expat is short for the word "expatriate," meaning someone who leaves their home country to live for a time in another one. It is somewhere between a tourist and an immigrant, although neither of these. A tourist is simply on vacation for a short time; an immigrant has left everything behind in their birth country to start fresh. Usually for safety or for greater opportunities.

Probably the most famous American expats were from the early twentieth century, post WW 1-- Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, along with other writers, artists and composers who lived abroad, most often in and around Paris. They traveled freely to Italy and Spain as conditions allowed. European visas were not as strict as they are now; obtaining residency was not a requirement.

A Moveable Feast is Hemingway's memoir about those days, written back when he was a struggling young writer in Paris.

Back then, everything cost less in Europe than in the United States, likely due to a post-war economy. This provided a strong motivation to live abroad for young writers and artists. 

Hemingway and Fitzgerald were often broke and asking their publishers for advances. They sold short stories to make quick money. Hemingway worked as a reporter and sent articles back to the States about European post-war conditions. Occasionally the Fitzgeralds would go to Hollywood, where he wrote movie scripts to afford another year or two in Paris. It wasn't the kind of writing either of them wanted to do, but it paid the bills. 

Expat retirees will often go where their dollar goes farther, just as Hemingway and Fitzgerald did. As writers, they were also attracted by the lively artistic scene. A top attraction for Canadian and American expats is the temperate weather south of the border.

Besides Central and South America, other popular expat destinations are Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines. Or there is India and Dubai, which I've heard is popular with the British expat. Although Dubai may not currently be the best choice, with war in the Middle East right now.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith tells the stories of six British expats in India. Their various lives reflect major reasons for why they left England to live at "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." Personal, Financial and Health being at the top of the list. 

These are same reasons that motivate many expats in real life. Personal, Financial, and Health: all very strong motivational forces to answer the Why.

As for me, I can live better for less in Mexico. And the weather makes me happy.

Drive or be Driven?

 

I have three methods of getting around town, listed in order of frequency: on foot, in taxis, on a bus. Although I avoid the local buses until I get familiar with the routes. 

In Veracruz, Mexico, where I lived for four years, I caught the bus to Walmart or Costco, then took a cab home with my bags of groceries. The bus was 50 cents and the cab about $3.00. However, most of the daily shopping was on foot in my own neighborhood at small stores just around the corner.

It's easy in Latin countries to not have a car, which is nearly impossible in the States. Mine lives at my son's house when I'm gone.

Expats who want their own cars, will either drive down to their newly adopted home or buy a car once they arrive. I knew two families with children who regularly drove back and forth between the US and Guatemala. They said as long as you took the major, state highways and traveled in daylight hours, everything was fine.

Taxis and busses are everywhere in Latin countries, relied on for transportation since many local folks don't own cars. And definitely not two or three of them like we do in America. 

In America, your own car means freedom. I want my own vehicle when I'm in the US, to come and go as I please. 

But out of the country, I appreciate the break from car culture. To walk to the local market for my produce and essentials. To not have to worry about traffic or parking or licensing and registration. When I do need a ride, I'm happy to pay someone else to do the driving. 

Comitan, Chiapas

Comitan is a medium size town in the Mexican state of Chiapas, near the Guatemala border. It's proximity made it the obvious choice for Bruce and me to try when we decided to leave Guatemala for Mexico. I had read about it in a travel blog; it sounded worth a visit. 

A day's bus ride, cross the border, catch a van on the other side, another hour's ride, and we were in Comitan. The full story of our Guatemala/Comitan expat experience is in my book, We Burned Our Boats.

Suffice it to say that we fell in love with Comitan and found our home the next day. It came about through local networking. In this case, we asked a taxi driver about places for rent. We hired him the next day to take us around, and this apartment was perfect. 

Nice neighborhood near a park. Furnished with good furniture and appliances, spotlesly clean with a wall of windows letting in plenty of natural light. And affordable enough for us although high for locals. The landlady shaved a little off the price with a six-month lease.

We loved this apartment, and we loved this town. We made good friends among the local members of our church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has a very strong presence all through LATAM. These were our communities both in Panajachel, Guatemala and in Comitan.

We lived in Comitan for nine months, not as long as we had hoped, but we had business to take care of in the States. Little did we know that two years later, Bruce would be gone. And my next flight to Mexico would be as a widow in grief, seeking solace in the country where we had been so happy.

Bruce with two missionary friends on Christmas Eve. The one on the left was from Honduras, the one on the right from Mexico City.

Banking as an Expat

 I've lived semi-permanently outside my home country off and on for twelve years. In this time, I've never opened a bank account outside the US.

I did try one time during a long stretch of living in Mexico. I forget the reason why, but it seemed important at the time. It took hours of paperwork. You'd think I was applying for a mortgage or car loan, which in the States is way less hassle than opening this deposit account with a few hundred dollars in it. Finally, the ordeal completed, the banker walked me to the front ATM machines to try out my new debit card. It worked, concluding our business.

A few weeks later, I tried withdrawing pesos from an ATM just to make sure the card still worked. It did not. Back to the bank I went, wasting another afternoon for them to finally inform me they had closed the account on a technicality. Nobody was sure what the technicality was. I had a feeling it was because the address listed with Immigration on my temporary residency card did not match the address I used to open the account. That's my best guess. Fair enough, can't blame them, but then why approve me in the first place?

It took another trip back to the bank to get the cash I had deposited. Never again. I do just fine with the system I've used for many years in several different countries. There's money in my bank at home. In three banks, actually, just in case there's a problem with one, I have options. 

I do not want to ever be left without options to get cash in the local currency when I'm in a foreign country. Larger businesses will take a credit card, but in LATAM cash is king. You can bargain with cash. Conclude your transaction smoothly and quickly with cash. And if you count your change, nobody can cheat you by stealing your information. 

All this may sound troublesome and nerve-wracking but to me it is fun. It's like playing Monopoly with Mexican pesos or Chilean pesos or Peruvian soles or Guatemalan quetzales.

And in general, the exchange rate is favorable to the dollar, giving me more for less. One of the positives about expat life. That, and the weather.

Apartment Living, Airbnb Style

 My theme for this year's A to Z Challenge is The Expat Life. My husband and I began our expat journey in February, 2010, when we sold everything and moved to the Lake Atitlan region of Guatemala. There was a break when we moved back to the States six years later. 

Unfortunately, he passed away in 2018. Two years later, I returned off and on to the expat lifestyle. Eight years later, I am all in. On my own now, missing him, but still spending the majority of my time out of the country.

Many Americans and Canadians, impressed by how cheaply they can buy homes in Latin America (LATAM) promptly invest in property. Bruce and I never did that, choosing not to be tied down in that way. We rented some lovely homes, one especially we never wanted to leave. This was our cozy nest of an upstairs apartment in Comitan, Chiapas. 

None of these were found online, mostly by networking with local folks. 

To the right, is a beautiful home I found with networking locally, when I returned to the single, expat life. It had 3 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, patios and gardens, large kitchen, dining room, living room. Rent was $500 a month in 2021. Near the beach. I didn't figure I'd ever leave. I lasted 4 years.

Now I find my places online, most commonly through Airbnb. I look for affordability, cleanliness, positive reviews, location, weather, and the responsiveness and gentility of the owners. You can tell a lot about a person with back-and-forth messaging and asking the right questions. 

I really don't need a house or anything fancy. I'm fine with a well-proportioned apartment.

Currently, I'm in an upstairs apartment that has everything I need, plus a few things I don't need but really like: A corner desk, a dining room table, air-fryer, full-size fridge, and stove with oven, specifically. It's in a nice area of a nice city and costs me $700 a month. 

I like it well enough that I plan to return next summer. The owner is happy about that and offered me a significant discount on the rent.

In ten weeks, I'm leaving this city and going to another Airbnb in another location. I get restless and don't like to stay in one place too long. Four to six months is my absolute limit, even if I like a place. Even back home close to my family, I barely last 4 months. 

A person never knows how they will react to loss of a spouse, their beloved companion of many years. But usually within a year, one finds out. For me, it was this restlessness, this inability to settle in any one location, regardless of how ideal it may seem at first.

 Fortunately, I was already very familiar with the expat life, and it wasn't difficult to pick up where Bruce and I had left off. 

My Theme for the A to Z Challenge

My theme for the Challenge this year is The Expat Life. I will post every day but Sunday in April about living as an American Expat in (mostly) Mexico.

If you're interested in signing up for the A to Z Challenge, please go here, to the official website. Sign up begins March 23. The Theme Reveal is an optional Blog Hop for participants to reveal their themes.

Having lived out of my home country off and on for twelve years, I'm excited about this theme because I have so much to share. It shouldn't be too hard to come up with 26 blog posts from A to Z. I like writing them in advance to take the pressure off. Then I can spend time visiting other blogs in the Challenge and discovering new ones.

What are we reading?

 My pattern is to read two books consecutively, one non-fiction and one light fiction. Which one gets picked up depends on my mood and energy level. 

My current light fiction is the Nero Wolfe detective series by Rex Stout. I find them enjoyable, despite usually knowing the endings half-way through. 

The setting is 1940s through 1960s Manhattan. Its streets, restaurants and fancy apartments are featured prominently in the plot and action. Nero Wolfe is a 300 lb., fancy-beer-drinking agoraphobe who stays within the confines of his office, his dining room, and the extensive orchid garden on the roof. 

His assistant, Archie Goodwin, does the detective legwork and narrates the stories.

Rex Stout, like Agatha Christie, having found the formula that made them rich, kept churning out their books one after another for our reading pleasure. Stout wrote 47 Nero Wolfe books, including novellas and short stories. Christie wrote about twice that many, although not with the same characters. And her endings are not easy to guess.

The non-fiction book I just finished is How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams. The Dilbert creator recently died of prostate cancer at age 68, and because of my son's cancer, I am interested in all things related to this terrible scourge. So, I picked up this one, wondering "What was his life ten years before the cancer?"

The book is memoir-ish, giving it an edge for me over the generic how to succeed book. I appreciated Scott's sardonic humor: "Why would anyone take advice from a cartoonist?" 

I didn't agree with all his theories but found plenty to make it worth the read, such as his distinction between setting goals and establishing systems. (Systems are more effective at achieving success than goals, he claims convincingly. I have since addressed my chronic, goal-setting addiction by rewording them as systems.)

Having finished this, I'm ready for another intelligent non-fiction. 

I have several Nero Wolfe books waiting on my Kindle. I'm not yet bored with Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. I like getting transported to 1950s Manhattan.