Escaping the rat-race, find the perfect hideaway. The Wandering Writer

Good morning to everybody! Finally, is Saturday and with these four days of holiday, I can really find some time to relax, recharge and take some time to write and enjoy my family and friends.

It is just a little treat, that doesn’t really fix my need of time for myself and for the things I really like to do, and this week I am going to go into detail about our list and how we reached the top ten possible candidates.

As I said previously there are 190 countries in this world and the choice might be difficult. However, once you go through the list of requirements the destination country must have, then you will find yourself with a list of ten-twenty countries.

Well, that is already and easier task, isn’t it?

We put our list on an excel file assigning to each country a rank based on the requirements. Then, we put them into an order from the one which matched our requirements the best to the one which matched them the least.

You might think that at this point you might have just to pick the first and you are ready to go… WRONG!

This might lead you to the first mistake, “what if I go to live there and I don’t like it even if it was on the top of my list?”

For this reason, although we were pretty excited to have the possible places, we were far from the final decision. So the next step includes the most pleasant part of all, spending long holidays in all those countries.

We decided not to go and book a hotel, but to rent an apartment. In this way we could have experienced the everyday life, the costs for the groceries, getting information from our neighbors and get a glimpse of the lifestyle.

I suppose you would like to know which our target countries were, and here they are:

1.       Chile

2.       Uruguay

3.       Argentina

4.       South Africa

5.       Vietnam

6.       Italy

7.       Ecuador

8.       Thailand

9.       Spain

However, after another consideration, Chile dropped off the list because of the risk of earthquakes, Vietnam and Thailand were erased from the list because a foreigner cannot buy one plot of land and build a house on it. You can only buy a flat there.

Italy is the country I know best because is the place I was born, and I’ve spent the first 28 years of my life there. Although I would have loved to go back and spend my life there, the prices would have been too high for early retirement. Moreover, it seems like the properties in the middle of nowhere, in the countryside are overpriced then respect those in the middle of the city. This is because many foreign pensioners are going to retire in Italy and they are generally those who can afford a higher price for the estate, so the demand makes the price, unfortunately.

So, our list includes now five countries, and only one is located in Europe.

We started to travel…

South Africa, we really fell in love with it, (OK we loved Africa since a long time ago, so no wonder about it. You can check the blog about South Africa “The land of Nelson Mandela” 2.7.17). It had everything we needed and everything we wanted to have except for the cost of living. Too expensive for the budget we have in mind, and we didn’t get the idea of a country that can offer the same level of safety we were looking for. Gated properties with electrified fences and surveillance cameras made us think that we should have become a lot more paranoid… No, we wanted to live in a neighborhood where people communicate and cooperate, rather than look at each other with a suspicious glance.

So, with a big sad sigh we crossed off South Africa from the list.

Four to go…

At that point, destiny started to give us some hints.

We have lived in the same house now for ten years, we kept some of the garden furniture from the previous owner because they were lovely. One of these is an old wooden fruit basket coming from… Argentina. 

“Interesting,” I thought.

A couple of days after, a friend of mine introduced me a girl who just moved to Finland, she was from Argentina.

“Very interesting,” I thought.

We decided to plan the next trip and suddenly a great offer came simultaneously to our email “deal flight to Buenos Aires…”

“You gotta be kidding me,” I whispered.

Our flight was a bit complicated: Helsinki-Frankfurt, Frankfurt-Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo-Buenos Aires.

On the first flight we were seated close to a lovely lady who was returning home to Germany after a holiday in Helsinki… Her mother was from Argentina.

“OH, PLEASE!!!”

On the flight to Sao Paulo, a lovely girl was seated close to us and after a chat we discovered that also her mother was from Argentina…

“This is ridiculous!!” I yelled within myself.

To read about our experience in Argentina, you might want to check the blog “The wandering Writer lost her heart in Argentina” of the 7.15.17.

After our holiday, we returned back home with the strong feeling of having finally found our “home.” From that day on, I can tell you, Argentina has called us in many ways, and with a smile on our faces now we have a destination and we are working hard on that target. However, finding the right place doesn’t mean having solved all the problems, more to come together with the solutions.

Wish you a great Weekend!!

Stay Tuned!