PARAGUAY POST

I’m still thinking about getting back to the Americas. (I say “still” though I don’t know if anyone reading this ever knew that was on the table in the first place.)(Actually, I shouldn’t talk out loud about these ideas.  Evidently, I tend to come up with some pretty hair-brained ideas, get all excited and tell everyone about them, and then…..don’t do them.  Just forget about them, actually, and people roll their eyes and say “Oh yeah?  Is that the plan this week?” Or words to that effect.) (But I digress.) 

What?  Where was I?  Oh…

Uruguay is on the bucket list, but living there would be like living in the E.U. – far too expensive (that said, I could probably afford to live in Portugal, which wouldn’t be bad, but not really an improvement on Georgia, which is, itself, perfectly OK)(It was also one of those ideas I talked about last year.)(I should stop these parentheses.)  

Another idea I had was to return to Mexico.  But Mexico has gotten too big for its own britches – they’ve increased the minimum income necessary to get permanent residence, and it’s no longer possible for an American to do the twice-annual visa run across the border.  Paraguay, on the other hand, is looking pretty good.

      Paraguay is one of those countries that everyone has heard of but no one knows anything about and is even less interested in if it’s even possible to have less than zero interest.  One of my students – a Chilean expat living in California – suggested it to me when I mentioned that Uruguay turned out to be too expensive.  First, she suggested Chile, but I had to laugh in her face and ask her how, exactly, Chile is materially different (at least in cost of living) from Uruguay.  She laughed too, realizing that the difference to HER is that Chile is her home, which means home to friends and family, a.k.a. a support network, which I utterly lack, pretty much anywhere in the world.  

That means that cost of living is EVERYTHING  to me.  Hell, I wear that on my sleeve.  I’m almost (almost??) PROUD of it.  Look at the name of the website.  

So anyway, she suggested Paraguay, and I laughed again, but this time because of how very NOTHING I know about the place.  A week ago, the only way I’d have been able to place Paraguay on a map of South America is to name all of the other countries and the one left over would be it.

      And once you do place it on a map, it’s not any more inviting.  For one, it’s landlocked.  Right there, it’s suddenly a deal-breaker for a lot of people.  It would be for me, too, except see above, about support networks and cost of living.

      It’s also a poor country, meaning a lot of unsavory things to a lot of people, but those people either have no intention of leaving their own countries anyway or else they’re made of money and can live as easily in Switzerland or Singapore or London as anywhere else.  That ain’t me.  I’m The Skint Expat. (Picture me with a cape and my fists on my waist.)  “Poor country” is my base line. So what’s it got going for it?  “Poor country” apart from being affordable to live in, has a few possible, even likely, disqualifications.  One of them is irregular electrical service.  Paraguay turns out to not only have incredibly reliable electricity service but also almost impossibly 100%-renewable power.  Their service is entirely hydroelectric, with the second largest hydroelectricity dams in the world, damming the Paraguay river.  The second is unreliable or weak Internet, but every source I’ve found promises that Paraguay’s Internet service is, like the rest of South America, some of the best in the world.  

      Rent and food – cheap.  Booze and cigarettes – ditto.  Marijuana – decriminalized (not exactly legal yet but certainly accessible).  Pet-friendly (you may remember that I still have one kitty left) – yes.  Less important, but indicators that they are at least doing what they can with what’s available:  Homosexual marriage – not yet, but looking like it’s going in that direction, public transportation – decent.  Cost of getting some sort of legal residence – the lowest I have heard of anywhere, by a factor of at least ten. Crime rate – reasonably low.  Statistically a little bit lower than where I’m living now, and I have no complaints about Tbilisi.

      So what’s wrong with Tbilisi?  Nothing.  Not a damned thing at all.  The problem I have with Tbilisi lies with me, not the city or country.  I could live here indefinitely just doing a visa run once a year.  There’s no limit to how many of those I can do.  But to have some sort of legal status as a proper resident here would cost me a lot of money and take years to work out, though it’s not entirely out of my reach.  No, my problem with Georgia is the language.  Considering that the language is utterly useless outside of this country, it’s ridiculously, laughably complicated, and difficult, with verb tenses and noun declinations and lots of other things that I have absolutely no intention of burdening myself with.

      Paraguay – Spanish.  I can already speak Spanish.  Oh, it has another language that is marginally more widely spoken, but it’s an officially, and on the ground, actually, Spanish-speaking country.  And one thing that I like about its lack of popularity and lack of tourist spots is a VERY low expat population.  Almost no tourism, either, really.  That puts a lot of expats off, but not me.  I tend to be introverted and somewhat solitary.  So it’s looking good.

      One downside that has occurred to me is the difference in time zones.  To maintain my current students, I’d have to work from 2 am to 1 pm.  Which is certainly possible, but not ideal.  I could maybe build up new clientele, but Americans (and here I’m referring to the continent, not the U.S.) aren’t prepared to pay as much for English lessons, and since they are Spanish speakers (Spanish being a much more global language than, say, Polish or Ukrainian), there’s less of a need.  This is just a guess, though.  I don’t need thousands of students to keep my business afloat.  My business is just me.  Paraguay’s time zone puts me in the middle of the 10 or so time zones in the Americas, giving me easy access to more well-to-do countries like Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, etc.  Not to mention expats in the U.S. and Canada.  I might just be able to build up new clients from there.  So….

      Those are my current thoughts.  They’re just thoughts, though.  I have no immediate pressing need to find a different place to live.  I just can’t justify, to myself, living long-term in a place where I have no intention of learning the local language.

Stay tuned…..and thanks for reading.