Why We Left an Anthology of American Women Expats

by Janet Blaser

  Why We Left

  An Anthology of

  American Women Expats

  Compiled and Edited

  by Janet Blaser

  Why We Left: An Anthology of American Women Expats

  Collected essays of 27 women happily living in Mexico

  Copyright © 2019 by Janet Blaser

  All rights reserved. This book may not be used or reproduced in any manner without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is for the use of quotations in a book review.

  Cover designed by Marysol Galvan Pelayo

  Janet Blaser

  Visit the author’s website at

  www.whyweleftamerica.com

  and her Facebook page, @whyweleftamerica.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: February 2019

  For Spike, Vrinda & Dennis,

  with love

  “I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place.

  Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous

  streets in which they have played remain but a place of passage.

  They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known.

  Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends them far and wide in the search for something permanent to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the

  wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim

  beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to

  which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar

  to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.”

  —The Moon and Sixpence

  by W. Somerset Maugham

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  1. “The Bug”

  2. “Welcome to Palapa-Ville”

  3. “Living My Dream”

  4. “Raising a Polyglot”

  5. “Exit Strategy”

  6. “Bagels, Bats & Bikes”

  7. “The Constructs We Construct: On Identity, Belonging & Home”

  8. “The Long & Winding Road”

  9. “Finding Joy”

  10. “Wanderlust”

  11. “Leap of Faith”

  12. “Falling in Love (Twice!)South of the Border”

  13. “Not Quite What I Expected”

  14. “Rebirth”(A series of blog posts)

  15. “I Call Oaxaca, Mexico, Home”

  16. “In Search of Connection”

  17. “You’re Moving WHERE?!”

  18. “We’re Not in Kansas Anymore”

  19. “Seeking Paradise”

  20. “Choosing Happiness”

  21. “Poco a Poco”

  22. “NYC to CDMX”

  23. “Finding My Heart & Soul”

  24. “Home Is Where The Heart Is”

  25. “How to Trip & Fall Gracefully”

  26. “Why Mexico?”

  27. “Just. Like. That.”

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Why We Left

  An Anthology of

  American Women Expats

  Introduction

  I moved to Mexico in 2006, driving alone from California with only a few months preparation and planning. I didn’t know anyone else who had done this—friends said I was either courageous or crazy—and I didn’t know anyone in Mazatlán, where I was headed. What I did know is that the deep happiness I’d felt while there on vacation was something I hadn’t felt in a long, long time (if ever) and was something I definitely needed and wanted in my life.

  And so I made that momentous move. Since then, more than a decade has passed, and I can’t imagine ever living in the U.S. again. For sure, there’s been lots of stumbling—the language, the customs, starting a business—but even more, there’s been smooth sailing. I smile more, relax easily, am more patient and open to that very Mexican concept of “mañana.” I don’t stress about the small stuff and watch curiously those who do. When I visit family now I increasingly feel like a “stranger in a strange land,” a fish out of water, a visitor. I’ve evolved, I think, into a better person.

  During the time I’ve lived in Mexico, I’ve met many other expats, from the U.S., from Canada, from Europe and elsewhere. One afternoon I started thinking about how different we all were—why we came, how we got here, what it took, why we stayed, what our lives look like now. I wondered if there was a common denominator, a thread that somehow connected us all to this Mexican adventure we were so happily having.

  I began in the most simple way to look for women to tell their stories, posting on Facebook expat pages all over Mexico, reaching thousands of people. From those that responded I asked for a short description of who they were and chose a representative cross-section of women of varying ages, marital and financial status, location and length of time in Mexico. All were eager to share their experiences. We were off!

  Like me, the other 26 women you’ll hear from in this book have recreated their lives and themselves in Mexico. Some were seeking adventure; some wanted an affordable, beautiful place to retire; others found business or career opportunities that wouldn’t have been possible north of the border. They are all ages, from millennials to elders; some are married, some single, some with young children or children who’ve grown up in both worlds. Some planned and saved for years, while others made a spur-of-the-moment decision. They come from all walks of life, from all over America, and settled throughout Mexico: in the fabled colonial cities, the coastal tropics, beachfront tourist towns, the mountain villages. Some are “newbies,” with only a year or two under their expat belts, while others have stopped counting the years as their life in Mexico has become their norm.

  As you read you’ll see similarities, too; most notably that everyone is happy and no one regrets their decision to move to Mexico. At the same time, each story is so different I found it impossible to read all of them straight through; I needed time between them to consider and contemplate and reflect.

  My hope is that this book does two things: That it inspires others who may be feeling an urge, an itch, something deep down that just won’t go away, to live a different life, outside of the proverbial box, where happiness is easier to come by. And secondly, that it applauds the grand adventures these women are having.

  As for me, I can look at who I’ve become and point to this one decision—to move to Mexico and become an expat—as a crucial turning point in my own personal evolution. These essays speak to the truth of that experience: the challenge of our struggles, the delight of our joys and our gratitude for all of it. We’ve been humbled and we’ve seen moments to be proud of. But mostly we’ve wondered and considered, time and again, what the heck we were doing, and how glad we were to be doing it.

  1. “The Bug”

  Virginia Saunders

  Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco

  I remember when I first got the bug.

  After a morning of sightseeing in Arles, we were having a late lunch on the Place du Forum. Our rosé was delicious, so we ordered a pichet, thinking it would be two more glasses. But it turned out to be four.

  Oh well. If there’s one thing we’ve learn
ed in our travels, it’s to just go with the flow. So we ditched our itinerary and just let the afternoon unfold.

  Across from us, Le Café La Nuit looked the same as it did when Van Gogh painted it, and there was a small market on the square. As we nursed our wine, tables of Frenchmen talked animatedly about politics, and smartly dressed women stopped by for a pastis and a pastry.

  I thought, “This is the life!” and started to wonder if it could be our life. I was making a good living as the creative director of an advertising agency in Southern California, and I’d begun to think about retirement, although I was only 55 at the time.

  We left Arles and headed for Avignon and Aix-en-Provence, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a simpler life more enjoyable than the one we were living. And I resolved to start investigating the possibility.

  Back home, things were stressful at work. My agency had been bought by the largest advertising agency holding company in the world. And because my boss’s final compensation would be based on our performance over the next three years, maximizing profit became the lens through which everything was viewed. We hired a shiny new CFO to play bad cop regarding money matters, and set some very aggressive revenue goals, which through a combination of luck and pain we managed to achieve. I was working much harder than I wanted to, but my quarterly bonuses removed some of the sting.

  Molly and I were able to take two trips outside the country a year, usually for three weeks at a time. And by 2010, we were exploring less-visited destinations like Corsica, Catalonia and the Basque Country—always with an eye toward moving abroad.

  Coming back to California was predictably a letdown. Although there are many things I love about the Golden State, we were isolated out in the suburbs and the cost of living was crippling.

  After a particularly bleak homecoming, we sat down and made a wish-list of what we’d want in a home base. For Molly, living by the beach, preferably a surf beach, was tops, while I wanted good infrastructure, great food and a welcoming expat community.

  Like most people interested in living abroad, I subscribed to International Living and pored over the articles every month. Costa Rica seemed to tick most of our boxes, so we did a research trip in 2012 to San Jose, the Océ Peninsula and Tamarindo. Even though I knew that 100+ degree temperatures and flat surf were unusual for March, I knew pretty quickly I couldn’t be happy living there.

  When I returned to work that year, some personnel changes and a new reporting structure made things really difficult for me. So after eight years, I quit my job. Because I’d lasted significantly longer than any of my predecessors, my boss thought he’d need at least half a year to find a suitable replacement. He asked me to stay through September, and since I didn’t have a plan, I agreed. To his credit, he gave me a generous severance package and treated me fairly.

  I spent that six months trying to figure out where we’d like to live and how to make a living without a day job. I figured I’d be able to make enough money freelancing to make ends meet, and at first, that was true.

  Using our wish list as a guide, we came up with a short-list of places we might like. We loved Biarritz and San Sebastian, but when it came to cost of living, neither was what you’d call a bargain. Portugal seemed to hit all our buttons, especially Cascais, which was a 30-minute train ride from Lisbon and had surfing, beautiful beaches, good restaurants and an International Women’s Club.

  By the time we visited in 2015, I was pre-sold and ready to move. We loved Cascais, but also thought Carvoeiro or Praia da Luz could work. I liked everything about Portugal, especially the proximity to the rest of Europe. But not being a cheap, easy flight to Paris meant it was difficult and costly to get back to the Pacific Northwest, where Molly’s elderly parents lived.

  Her mother was going to need care and her father would need help managing that process and downsizing. After really thinking things through, we concluded that it didn’t make sense for us to move that far away. So we started to look closer to home.

  My freelance business had fallen off a cliff. A decade before, being able to craft a great headline was a skill you could take to the bank. But now that everyone’s marketing budget was skewed heavily toward Google and Facebook ads, ads practically wrote themselves. All you had to do was add a noun or a verb to your keyword. Et voila.

  Once we started to see more money going out than coming in, we doubled down on our search.

  We liked the idea of Mexico, so when Molly’s niece invited us to her December wedding in Cabo San Lucas, we decided to spend a few extra days checking out San Jose del Cabo. With dozens of galleries, a charming hotel and lots of romantic restaurants, the town was lovely. But it was about a 25-minute walk to the beach, and the oceanfront hotels were all-inclusive, which made it hard to grab a beer or a meal on the shore. For us, this was a deal-breaker. So it was back to the drawing board.

  By now, I was doing quite a bit of research online, and I had stumbled across a blog by Tricia Lyman. She and her husband were looking for the perfect place to retire abroad and in the process had checked out Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Ecuador and ended up saying, “We don’t like any of these places as much as we like Puerto Vallarta—let’s try that.”

  Tricia’s blog, “Lyman’s Journey,” was a fascinating read, full of helpful information. She had also started a Facebook page called “Puerto Vallarta: Everything You Need or Want to Know” that was an absolute godsend. I spent the next month or so reading Tricia’s blog and researching Puerto Vallarta. Molly and I had both been to P.V. in the mid-1980s, and then once on a cruise in 2006. But we weren’t that familiar with it, although our impressions were positive.

  We decided to do a six-day research trip, which closed the deal. We stayed a few nights downtown and a few nights in the Marina, so we could check out several neighborhoods. It was hard to resist the ocean-front promenade, the lively restaurant scene on Basilio Badillo and the incredible sunsets that seemed to be a nightly event. There was no expat event during our visit, but Sara Wise, the organizer, agreed to meet us for a drink and let us pick her brains. She and her husband were a big help.

  We had no intention of renting a place on that trip, but we wanted to look at as many properties as we could so we’d know what fair market value was and how much we would realistically need to budget for. We saw more than a dozen places, but most of them wouldn’t work for us for one reason or another. Many involved a steep, uphill climb. Others were open-air affairs without walls. One even had bats living in the laundry room. Most wouldn’t accept a big dog.

  Discouragement set in. So when the agent showed us a lovely place in the Zona Romantica in our price range—one that took dogs—we went ahead and pulled the trigger. We agreed to begin the lease on May 1, about six weeks in the future. Flying back to California, we were both equal parts excited and overwhelmed. There was so much to do and so little time. I’d been thinking about moving outside the country for nearly 10 years, but when the rubber met the road, I felt completely unprepared.

  Once we got organized, the to-do list was daunting. In no particular order, we needed to:

  Get our house ready to sell

  Prepare for house guests coming from England in early April

  Find solutions for banking, mail service and working remotely

  List our house

  Figure out how to transport the stuff we were taking to Puerto Vallarta

  Figure out how to get our dogs to Puerto Vallarta

  Figure out how to get rid of the stuff we weren’t taking

  Get health insurance

  We’d moved twice in the past for my work. Since I was always starting a new job in a few weeks, I never had time to go through my belongings. We just packed everything up and hit the road. Once we arrived at the new place, we’d unpack the boxes that contained the things we used and leave the others to gather dust in the basement or garage. When I
finally opened up all the boxes to see what we had, I was shocked at all the things we’d hauled from one coast to the other that we didn’t want or need.

  We classified everything one of three ways: 1) Things we were definitely moving with us; 2) Things we were on the fence about; and 3) Things we were getting rid of. As time went by, the vast majority of items in the second category moved to the third.

  We planned to take our two dogs on the plane with us, one in a carrier under the seat and one below in a kennel. This limited the number of other things we could realistically take with us in one trip. We realized that we’d need to fly down twice: once to take down a load, and the second time to bring everything else and the dogs.

  Doing a deep dive into your possessions is an emotional and time-consuming proposition. You can’t throw away notes from your high school boyfriend without reading them first. You fall down one rabbit hole after another, and before you know it, four hours have passed and you’ve only been through two boxes.

  As time passed, we got more disciplined (or more panicked) depending on your point of view. Thoughtful consideration gave way to snap judgements about what to keep and what to toss.

  I’d inherited some things from my family I thought might be of some value—a 12-place setting of Limoges china, sterling flatware for eight, some Karastan rugs—but after getting quotes from sites like classicreplacements.com, it didn’t seem to be worth the effort. When we realized that getting rid of our stuff would be time-consuming and not as lucrative as we’d hoped, we looked at the alternatives. Having an estate sale seemed like the best option. We found several companies in our area, consulted Yelp to see which ones were highly rated, then went to a couple of sales to see how organized they were.

  We were impressed by the reviews and organization of one of the companies and called them to come out and give us an estimate. They were excited because most of their sales were for families who were trying to deal with the possession of elderly parents who had passed away. Consequently, a lot of the items were dated and undesirable.