Welcome and introduction

A little about who we are....

I'm honestly a little out of my depth here. Not sure how to sum up how we came to be here. Sometimes I sit in my kitchen and I look our the window into the jungle and I ask myself that same question.

I am a newly 46 year old woman who grew up in New Jersey and spent the last almost twenty years in California. How I came to California is a story for another day. But there we were, Ventura county California, in a place that most people would kill for. And it was beautiful. And I did love it. For a time.

As the years passed, I started to love it less...for the same reasons most that feel that hidden resentment for a place they used to love...Cost of living became ridiculous and I mean that sincerely. When the cost of eggs reached $10 a dozen, I officially threw in the towel. The town I lived in more than doubled in size from a small community where people knew who you were to a town of over 100k, its fields and trees being overtaken by overpriced apartment complexes and big box brand stores. The coyotes that I loved to listen to, the occasional mountain lion sighting became things people talked about as dangerous nuisances that needed to be culled.

But then there were the bigger worries, the safety worries...the national scale type things. That after a while didn't feel like far away abstract things. They weren't someone else's problem. The gun violence issues became too much. I have two children, 19 yo and 8 yo. My little one started kindergarten during the pandemic, my oldest started college. Every day, we heard about another one. We became inured to it, but with each one, I felt a little piece of my soul die. A few years ago, the Borderline shooting was in a nightclub that was twenty minutes from my house. One that I have been to. Hell, my mother-in-law was there that night, and left two hours before the shooter was there. After the Uvalde shooting, something shifted. I watched those kids and how scared they were, their parents unable to help because those that should have turned on them and then did nothing. I thought about how that would have felt. And something big inside me died. I looked back and realized that over the last five years, even before pandemic, I had unconsciously started to not bring my family in places with big crowds. No more concerts, only local concerts in the park. No more festivals, except the yearly carnival and then I was tense, with my head on a swivel. No more movies, except middle of the day on a weekday, always sitting on the end of the row, close to an exit. We had traded for camping, beach, walks outside. But the fear was always there, just in the back of my head. Every time my son went to a movie premier late at night with his friends....Every time he went to an event, a party, hell...even a class, it was there.

And then there was how the country felt. It was everywhere, on social media, on the news, every time I rode down certain streets, in our schools. It was polarizing and ugly. It was angry, seething and waiting. I didn't feel joy in the air anymore. We were trudging though life, the air thick with something just under the surface that felt like oily residue on my soul. I love my country, but I didn't recognize it or my place in it anymore. It's like people have lost their minds. Corporations and greed became king, and the very essence of our future, our kids, were being sacrificed for the immediate payout. I became angry with how short sighted we'd become. How short our memories were. How absolutely stupid the arguments had become. People deliberately muddying the waters for those unwilling to question anything. I looked around and realized we were celebrating stupid and maligning science and higher education. The politics of winning had replaced governing and common sense. And then there was the racism...

For a multitude of reasons, we looked around, and we were drowning. We made the decision to put our house on the market, while the market was still good. And it sold the first week, at the first open house. From there it was a forty five day escrow and we found ourselves in a short term rental in the same neighborhood for six more months, while we waited for my husbands' surgery. Something routine, but we needed it before we could leave. Same neighborhood, so my kiddo could still go to school. Same neighborhood, so we could ease into the idea that this was really happening. Same neighborhood so it wasn't too awful of a launch for my son because he had decided he wasn't coming. Same neighborhood....$5000 a month for a three bedroom, three bath, 1800 sq ft house. That's how crazy it all had become.

Then, we figured it out, packed up what we could....got rid of a TON, put the rest in storage, made a LOT of mistakes. And we left. We landed in San Jose on St. Patrick's Day. We landed on the Caribbean coast the next day. The next two weeks in a hotel, scoping it out. Then we found our little spot of paradise. We rent a house in a small 2 hectare compound. It has six other houses on the property. We and two other expat families are long term. We went from worrying about letting my daughter out of sight, too much tablet time and junk food....to almost overnight, her running every waking second with the 4 other kids on our property that are all her same age. The junk food became a non-issue almost immediately as well. There is not a lot of processed food here. Yup, we still have the occasional box of mac and cheese or ramen, oreo's or potato chip....but either its not available or its too expensive. No frozen meals or snacks. The freezer section is almost all frozen meat. Almost all the food here has ingredient lists I can pronounce. I picked up chips the other day and it said potatoes, salt and oil. That was it.

As I am typing this, I am listening to a troupe of howler monkeys bellow in the distance. Last night, we found a 12 foot boa constrictor about 15 feet from our front door. Its wild and beautiful and magical here. I feel safer than I EVER did in America. I don't fear walking in the dark alone anymore. There is a sense of community here that I have never known in America. We spent part of the summer in Thailand. When we got back, we were driving the golf cart to town and two separate people that I don't know, waved to us, told us it was good to see us again, that they were glad to have us back. I was floored. One that they even noticed we were gone, and two that they would include us into the community like that.

I don't know if this is our final spot. But it's our right now spot. Come with us on this journey of self discovery, and falling in love with life again. I have no idea what we are doing most of the time, and we honestly are winging a lot of it. I hope our story inspires some, and helps demystify becoming an expat. Welcome.