Start With the Country, Not the City
Picture a couple named Marta and Ben. Both are fifty-eight, and both are tired of January. They sit at the kitchen table with a pad of paper and write the cities where they could see themselves living: Lisbon, Cuenca, Chiang Mai, Tbilisi and Oaxaca.
It is a good list, and it is how most of us begin. A city is something you can picture. You can see the cafes, the hills and the light on the buildings.
Then they start reading about the first city, and they find that it sits inside a country, and the country has rules. One country asks foreigners to show a steady monthly income before it grants a long stay. Another makes it hard to buy a house. A third offers no easy way to stay longer than a few months. The language, the taxes, the price of seeing a doctor and what the weather does in July all arrive with the country. The city is the part of the picture they chose. The country is the rest of it.
Marta puts the pad down. We have been choosing cities, she says, and we have not asked who sets the rules there.
They start over. This time they write countries, and under each one they write four lines. What the rules allow a foreigner to do. Which language the forms are in. What the weather does. What a month costs.
The list gets shorter. One city drops off because its country’s rules do not fit. One country they had never considered climbs to the top.
You might say it is easier to begin with a city you love. It is. A city you love can stay on the list. It could sit under its country, with the four lines beside it.
A second habit might help. When you test countries, you could visit first the ones you know least about. A country you have read nothing about carries none of your old pictures, so what you see there is what is there. In years of traveling, I have found that the places I expected least from taught me the most about what I want.
If you are making a list now, you could write the countries first. Under each, you could write the four lines. Only after that, you could choose the city, the town or the village.
The last line, what a month costs, is the one we can help with. On this site you could pick a way of living, a household size and a number of years, and see the money it would take in each country we cover. It shows the money each country would take. It does not tell you which country to pick.
Which country would you write first, and which one would you nearly leave off because you know nothing about it? Tell us in the comments. Someone reading may be sitting at a kitchen table with the same pad of paper.
Tell us in the comments