And it very much has been, although we’ve definitely been brought up short a few times, even though we’re only on Day Five. One key unanticipated difference is the distinction between being here as a tourist and as a (short-term) resident. Rather than frequenting tourist places, we’re shopping for home: groceries and housewares, not souvenirs and artifacts. When we were here before, we thought the city was pretty bilingual, but now that we’re not in tourist locations, it’s 100% Spanish.

Dorothy is on Year Three of Duolingo, and was pretty sure she could manage, but the speed with which people speak their native tongue makes keeping up really hard. Her favorite new sentence: “Despacio, por favor. Hablo como un bebé.”

The other eye opener, which is related to the first, is just how much friction there is to do anything. I tried to withdraw cash at an ATM, and sticking my card in the only available slot went nowhere. I just stared at the display hoping for some kind of prompt that I could decipher before giving up and going to another bank, whose ATM interface I could decode.

But every day things get a little easier and we get a touch more fluent. Since we plan to spend the first part of this escapade in Spanish speaking countries, we expect that things will continue to get easier over time.

But What About The Thorns?

One was about our… temperaments. We’re both pretty Type A: driven, organized, brutally efficient. The process of shedding required to get to this point jacked that up to 11 for both of us. We went from owning a multi-unit property with residential and commercial tenants to owning… nothing. No property, no car, no debt, all three of our business entities shuttered, everything completely wound down. We have a 10′ x 15′ storage unit to hold what little we didn’t sell, the holy of holies.

The logistics, the order-of-operations complexity required to pull off that level of divesting was ridiculous. So we’re barreling towards the 12th of November at full speed to hit our mark, knowing that when we land, we’ll go from this:

That was concerning. How would we handle the whiplash of going from 100 to zero in a single day? What would happen to us when we had nothing we had to do? Were tasks what held us together, and would we just deflate when the To Do list emptied out? Would we be bored?

Nah.

We’re fine. That particular part of the transition has been way easier than anticipated. Turns out we know how to relax, after all. Again, I’m writing this on Day Five, but if we haven’t had the holy-shit-how-are-we-going-to-fill-the-days moment, it seems unlikely that it’s waiting for us around the next corner.

But if things do start to feel stale and repetitive, that just means it’s time to pull up stakes and head somewhere else, where a new set of challenges will await us, to keep us fresh and engaged.

Anything Else?

Well, yes. And thank you for asking.

In addition to removing the Task List lifestyle that had become habitual, we knew we’d also be willfully removing the comfort behaviors that we’d built up over a lifetime together (48 years, as of touchdown). We had no idea what would rush in to fill all of that suddenly empty space.

As it turns out, some of those comfort behaviors were more adaptable and pernicious than we’d imagined. Case in point: nesting. We’ve occupied a ridiculous number of spaces in our 48 years together. We counted, not to say that we counted accurately, and came up with 22. No matter how objectively temporary or aspirationally permanent, owned or rented, we have always nested. We have customized, arranged, painted, settled in, rearranged, and closed any perceived gaps between what the space offered in its native form and what we needed to make the voices quiet. Always.

Embarking on a lifestyle that would, at best, have us spending three months at a time in a furnished rental apartment, that behavior was clearly consigned to the dustbin of our personal history. Our physical circumstances would put an end to that pattern.

Heh.

We have spent the past five days completely redecorating our rental. We have moved every piece of furniture except a really large wardrobe. We’ve moved the beds, dressers, tables, chairs, TV, and sofa. We’ve moved the refrigerator and the microwave. We’ve rearranged the kitchen storage.

We’ve shopped for missing items, many of which we’ll simply leave in the unit when we go. We’ve bought a broom, cleaning supplies, food storage containers, cloth napkins, new dish cloths, bathroom storage bins, and extra hangers. I’ve given serious consideration to replacing the toilet seat, but I know the shame from that will linger longer than is comfortable.

And we have laughed at ourselves during the entire process, fully aware of how ridiculous we are. But three months is a long time to live in a space that feels like a hotel room, to be followed by another three month quasi-hotel room, and another. I think we’d burn out pretty quickly if our physical space always felt temporary. This way, we feel like we’re home, and if we have to leave a few housewares behind us as the price to play, well, the housewares are pretty cheap.

But Did All The Excessive Planning Pay Off?

You know, it kind of did. For example, I did ridiculous amounts of research and planning around our phones. When we touched down in Oaxaca, our global data provider kicked in and we had local service. If you’ve texted us or called us, you’d never know anything had changed. Our phones work here exactly as they did before.

The VPN service has not only secured our data, but successfully tricked US providers into thinking we’d never left. We are able to watch Netflix on the TV in our apartment (laptop to HDMI…) without any glitches.

We also brought a tool kit, a portable office, and a sewing kit. Overkill? Ridiculous overkill? Seriously, who hurt you? Would these all just be sent back to the US with our first visitor?

Well, we’ve already used: needle nose pliers, utility knife, screwdriver, rubber bands, paper clips, and scotch tape. As I write this, Dorothy is in the bedroom rehemming the drapes in our apartment so they actually cover the windows properly. So… score a point for Team OCD.

Now that we’ve made our temporary home more like home, we’ll take you on a tour, and share the incredible fabulosity of our location.