I'm on mobile, so this will probably come out short and staccato, like bad prose poetry. I'm thinking about approaching the wife to seriously talk about moving out of the country. I'll shout out to flagamuffin, wasoxygen, and WanderingEng because they showed some interest in my rambling post. kleinbl00, if you see these, I'd love to hear your brutally honest, fuck any ego or feelings I might have, ideas on this. This is mostly musings on my part and the chances of us as a couple actually doing this are honestly pretty low. At the same time though, neither of us have done anything big or exciting with our lives, and something like moving to another country is our chance to literally go big or go home.
So I've been musing about places to be and things to do and here are some thoughts that I've had.
Neither my wife nor I have completed college or have what are considered any strong marketable skills, so job hunting in another country might be a bit of an issue as would potentially securing work visas or whatever you call them. Maybe she could teach English as a second language, as she's smart and approachable. Maybe I could open up my own store, maybe general goods or maybe something that sells niche American goods, like comic books or something. I'd half expect any country we would look moving too would have an agency I could send out letters to, saying "Howdy. We wanna move to your lovely neck of the woods. Tell us what to do and how to find work!"
We both only speak English, but she knows a handful of Spanish and I know a handful of French, so if we move to a country with one or both of those languages and hopefully English speakers here and there, we could make by for a bit until we learn the language better. I think anywhere we go, at least one of the core native languages need to be Germanic or Latin based. I think anything else would be too steep of a learning curve, ramping the difficulty of getting by up to 100.
I think safety for us would be a huge concern and there's multiple ways we could find ourselves in trouble. For example, I know in a lot of South East Asian countries, the governments allegedly don't do much to protect the rights of foreigners. Similarly, one of my co-workers travels with her family all over the Caribbean and Central America and she says poverty and crime are a huge problem almost everywhere. For example, she said in Costa Rica almost every neighborhood had bars on their windows and in Jamaica, they were advised to never leave resort grounds for their safety. That's scary. Similarly, we wouldn't want to find ourselves the target of theft or burglarly. A lot of this risk could of course be reduced by moving to a richer country, say in Europe, but cost of living and our lack of marketable skills would come in play, making getting by a hard thing to do.
Cost of living would have to be something we'd have to look very carefully at. For example, a place could have super cheap rent, but if food prices are through the roof, we might find ourselves in financial trouble. Knowing first hand how rough it can be to live in impoverished neighborhoods, we'd have to make sure wherever we end up is both affordable and safe.
Shit. Lunch is up. Ran out of time. I'll get back to this tonight.