After living in San Francisco for 25 years, it was time to leave. And as in all of my previous moves, the principal reason for leaving was because I was done & ready to go. I wasn’t sure where to move to, but nowhere in the US sounded appealing (not much does after you live in SF and won’t live anywhere colder), especially since I need to live in a walkable city. A friend lived in San Miguel de Allende, and suggested I move down there, and it just happened pretty quickly after that. I had always wanted to live in another country & learn a language, and since I had just started a business, the lower cost sounded great. The timing seemed perfect.
The most remarkable part of moving to SMA was how easy it was, it didn’t feel any different than moving within the US. Things are a little different, but the move was easy. I really liked my first year in SMA; I missed hiking around the Bay Area, but I walked all over San Miguel, aesthetically it has few equals. But I always felt that something was ‘too easy’ about living here, something I could never define. When I brought this up to people living in SMA, they immediately recognized what I was referring to, and could answer me with responses I knew had to have come from previous thought on this exact issue. One guy absolutely agreed with me, and said ‘so what? I decided long ago that it was worth it.’ Someone already had this exact dilemma years ago! At first this didn’t bother me, because there was so much to explore. But I really wasn’t sure if after I had seen everything there was to see, would there be anything under the hood to keep me in SMA.
One of the unexpected awesome things about SMA is all the places to travel nearby; for gringos almost any Mexican town with a square & church are lovely. Guanajato, Salvatierra, Pozos, there are tons of cute towns less than 2 hours away, gorgeous places that Americans have never heard of. After a year in SMA my partner wanted to move out of town because of the cuahetes. I would have stayed in SMA longer, but felt like living somewhere else could be fun – and for the first time, I started thinking about the concept of moving before I felt like I was done with a place, just to try living someplace new.
My partner & I wanted to travel, but we had full-time jobs, and were a bit poor. So we had an idea – why not move around Mexico, changing home base every six months or so. We could experience living in new cities; but also travel on the weekends and explore many new places, place that would each take days of travel & much cost from SMA but were easy from the new base. Since winter was coming, we decided to try the Yucatan for our first such endeavor, and we took an exploratory trip to Merida to check it out. We weren’t super impressed with Merida, it seemed a little like Queretero, a huge modern city wrapped around a small Centro Historico. We were looking for a prettier city, something more colonial, and checked out Valladolid a couple hours away, really the only other major city in the Yucatan. We loved it immediately, it is small but gorgeous, and decided to move there for 5 months, leaving for somewhere else yet undecided before the summer. Our leases ended March 31, and for the first time in my life, I moved somewhere with an expiration date.
If moving to SMA was not that different than moving somewhere in the US, moving to Valladolid was definitely different, way different. It wasn’t so easy like SMA, it had more of a third world feel, doing things was more difficult. Paying the water bill meant going to headquarters, where there might be a long line, or the cashier might have just left for an hour, with everyone still waiting. There is no laundry machine in the entire city hooked up to hot water. Little things took much more time than they should have. No one spoke English. Nothing major, no real issues mostly just things of convenience, but just a lot of little things that made life a little ‘harder’ there.
It made me realize what it was about SMA that was so easy – SMA just completely caters to gringos. It is the world’s largest retirement home basically, designed for easy living for gringos who don’t want to learn Spanish, who basically want the same experience as America, except with better weather & lower prices. Not that everyone in SMA is on that program, but if that’s what you want out of your life, there is no place I have seen that caters to you like SMA; you can pretty much live your life the same way you did back in the States. If you are one of those people, SMA is not that different than living in the US. If you are one of those people, Yucatan might be a difficult experience for you, at first.
There were a lot of expats, but surprisingly, there were almost no gringos; the expats and visitors were almost all from Northern Europe, and you always heard French, German, and strange Scando languages around town; going out to dinner felt like being in a Bergman movie. The city itself has a very Euro feel to it, at night it seems like you are in Rome the way everything is lit.
Valladolid isn’t a place I would consider moving to forever (too small, weather), but for 5 months it was a lovely experience. Because I knew I was moving out soon, it made me feel like my entire life was a vacation, even though I was working the entire time. It was a very different feeling than a more permanent move, where you are trying to ‘spread roots’ or ‘build up your network’. But we were there to travel around the peninsula, and that we did, and it was spectacular.
In 5 months, we were able to travel almost every place we wanted. Everything is close by in the small peninsula, we definitely felt like it was enough time to see everything. And travelling in this part of the world is super cheap, much cheaper than Guanajato. Busses are cheap, rental cars are reasonable, nice Airbnb’s or hotels easily under 1000 pesos. Breakfast for 2 for 100 pesos or so; Valladolid is pretty inexpensive, but the surrounding villages/towns are much cheaper.
Basically, the plan to travel while being poor & having full time jobs worked; by moving to a new place, and traveling on weekends, We were able to work full time, travel to many new places, and life seemed like a vacation. I know I wasn’t the first to think of this idea, but I’ve never heard it quite expressed in this way.
I’m back in SMA, but there’s nowhere here for me to explore anymore, and it’s time to move on. What would be perfect would be to string together 6-mont stints in various cities around Mexico, centers that have concentric circles to explore. Oaxaca, Puebla, San Cristobal, San Luis Potosi, Monterrey, are just some of the cities that seem like they would be great to live in for 6 months, to explore the town & surroundings. At some point maybe I’ll want to land somewhere & ‘spread roots’, but for now, the allure of exploring these Mexican towns is more seducing.
