#104 – The Expat Files: Love, Culture, and the Real Costa Rica

Automatically transcribed from the original recording; names and wording may contain errors.

[00:03] Hi everybody, I'm Johnny Mueller and you're listening to The Expat Files, living in Latin America. The show that tells you what it's really like to live, work, play and or retire in Latin America. I tell it just like it is, not the version they give you in those glossy travel magazines, or the picture they paint for you in those international traveler websites, where they're only trying to sell you something. What's it really like for expats living in Latin America? Well, it's time to take off those rose colored glasses and find out. So let's get started. You know, I get a lot of emails from people asking me to talk a little bit more about the love and romance theme down here in Latin America. Because I'm sure you might have imagined already that meeting, mating and dating, Latinas and Latinos is a whole different ball game with different rules than the way you play it up in the first world.

[00:48] So today I'm going to tell you a story about love and romance down here in the third world. A story about how an expat friend of mine found true love and romance by following the most twisted path imaginable. It's a story that's every bit worthy of expat Eddie in his wild and crazy romance episodes. But this story comes from a friend of mine, a rather conservative one, an ex stock and commodities broker from New York no less. And I guess you could say this is sort of a typical, atypical expat story, totally atypical in the way he came down here to live, and pretty typical in the way it ends up in the romance department. Though in the mind of a first world person who's never been down here, the whole thing is atypical from start to finish. And in fact if anybody ever wrote a script like this for Hollywood, no we'd ever believe it but I'm sure it would get a lot of laughs. So by popular demand, here's one big complicated love and romance story, probably one of the

[01:35] strangest ones that I've ever heard, but it happened right in front of my eyes so I had to believe it. And it all started down in Costa Rica about 15 years ago. Now I'd just built a little beach house, a two bedroom cabana, a couple of blocks from the Pacific Ocean, in a nice popular little beach area called Manuel Antonio, and that was before Manuel Antonio became really popular and all the tourists started coming down in a huge way. And back 15 or 20 years ago, beach houses, hotels and condos were just starting to pop up in the area. Now about 3 miles down from this little beachfront paradise is a town called Capos, at the time a small little fishing village of maybe 2000 people. The kind of sleepy run down fishing village you see all over Latin America, with just two or three ragged piers and a couple dozen boats anchored offshore. The town was nothing special at all, in fact it was pretty dingy, except for the fact that

[02:25] Capos had the luck of being only a couple of miles away from a sprawling new first world style beach development, and a national park called Manuel Antonio, which also was a big tourist draw, especially for people landing in San Jose because it's only about a two and a half hour drive, or a 20 minute flight from the international airport. Now the reason why I bring up this little town Capos is because later on it enters into the picture. Because you see before the tourists came and it was a sleepy little fishing village, everyone was laid back and somehow tied to the fishing trade. But about 25 years ago when the tourists first started coming and they started building the condos and the beach houses along that Manuel Antonio beach area a few miles away, well they had to have gardeners and cooks and construction people and cleaning ladies right? Well obviously they all had to come from somewhere and they came from that little town of Capos,

[03:13] only about 5 or 10 minutes away by bus. And if you live in Capos, you live like a native and it's about 10 times cheaper than if you lived on that strip where all the tourists are. Now once I had my little beach house built in Manuel Antonio, and by the way back then I was able to build that thing and buy the land for about 70,000 bucks, and today it would be about 3 or 4 times that amount. And about 3 or 4 times the noise, the tourists, the traffic and irritation too. Not my kind of place anymore at all, but that's for another show. Anyway, I'd make the 2 and a half hour drive from my house in San Jose down to that beach house most weekends. And after walking around and checking all the neighborhoods out, all those beach houses and condos and hotels that first world people had bought, built and were vacationing in during the high season or renting out, anyway I got to notice this one big spread.

[03:59] Up in the hills, a little ways from the beach, maybe about 8 blocks away, well I noticed one strange thing right away as I walked up one of the dirt roads alongside of it. I was able to peek over the wall and I just happened to see a full sized infield of a baseball diamond. Home plate and all the bases with a huge net suspended over it, so you could bat balls from home base and it hit that net and not go over the wall. And stationed permanently right between the pitcher's mound and second base, was one of those very expensive pitching machines. And if I remember right, that one cost about 5,000 bucks. And by the way, about 15 years ago, Montel Antonio maybe had 5,000 tourists during the high season. But these days it's probably 5 times that. Anyway, the word was out that there was this eccentric gringo who was just nuts about baseball, so nuts that he built himself a diamond and had a pitching machine and he'd go out there

[04:48] every day and smack balls for hours and hours at a time. And he'd hired a maintenance guy to take care of that machine and shag the balls, of course. And back then, 15 or so years ago, in Costa Rica, you could pay a guy 300 bucks a month and he'd be your gardener, maintenance man or even infield ball shagger. But today you'd probably have to pay double that, about 600 a month. That's what the gringo dollar does to vacation areas. Everything pretty much doubles in price or worse. Anyway, so eventually, as you always do, if you live in a small tourist town like that, you end up meeting almost all the permanent and temporary residents at one time or another, whether it's on the beach or at a party, in the supermarket, sitting in the restaurant or even standing in line at the bank. So soon enough I met this eccentric gringo and he invited me over to hit some balls, naturally. And I went along with it, why not?

[05:35] But I'm not much of a sportsman, so he had to turn his pitching machine down to the lowest level, probably like for a 12 year old. Anyway, that was the only way I could hit the ball. And you know, after a while we got to know each other. I found out he was a stock and commodities broker retired. And by the way, here's another example of a big insider who'd made millions and millions of dollars for him and his clients. He saw a huge financial crisis lurking and the big bubbles that were coming. Only he was about 20 years too soon. He liquidated his positions and got out right before the internet and the dot com bubbles. And though he still got out with millions, he told me if he would've stayed in the game just a few years longer, he probably would've been worth 10 times as much as he was then. But he never regretted selling out too soon and moving down to Latin America. And some years later, most of his buddies in the financial district went down the tubes

[06:22] when the bubbles burst. So he got the last laugh, but he doesn't think in those terms. He's just glad he got out when he did and that he lives a completely different lifestyle than the rat race he was running when he was in the brokerage business. So needless to say, he was a man after my own heart. So we bonded. Not to say that I was in his financial class, I mean the guy was worth 100 times more than I was. But we bonded on the things that mattered to us personally. So here he is in this huge house all alone with his baseball diamond. And by the way, I have to tell you, he had another outbuilding connected to the main house by a bridge no less that contained a completely outfitted gym equipped with every kind of high and low-tech fitness machine that you find at one of those big health clubs like Gold's Gym. And on one wall, he had pictures of himself with all these famous bodybuilders like Schwarzenegger

[07:07] and Lou Ferrigno. And he himself was built just like them. In fact, he was an award-winning bodybuilder back in New York when he was younger. And now he was about 55 or 56. But he still had that great big cut-up body because he worked out in his very own private gym every day. But really the most amazing thing about this guy was when I went in his living room, he had a baby grand piano in there, and of course those things never hold up well in the tropics unless you put him in an absolutely climate-controlled room. Which of course, he did. And when he turned on his big elaborate stereo system, all of a sudden opera was blaring out of the speakers. Then I noticed on one wall in that room, he had some certificates of merit and some awards that he'd been given, not for bodybuilding like I'd thought initially, but for singing opera. And then he sat down at the piano and belted out a piece for me and I couldn't believe

[07:56] it. The guy was tremendous, if you like opera. Which I don't because every time I've ever gone, I start snoring by the second act. Anyway, you don't say that when you're a guest in an opera lover's house, especially with a guy who's won awards for it and he's about twice as big as you are. So in time, I got to know this guy pretty well. But I couldn't help feeling a bit sorry for him because here he is. A guy with tons of money, a huge beautiful house, and he's all alone. Except for the usual staff necessary to run a place like that. Guards, maintenance guys, gardeners, cleaning ladies, and all that. So eventually we got to the subject of how he'd made it down to Costa Rica, decided to live there permanently, and build this big spread. And that's when things really got weird. Now here's what he told me. When he was a young guy in New York, his parents always wanted him to marry a nice Jewish girl.

[08:43] So he did, but it didn't work out. He said all she did was spend money, file her nails, go to the beauty parlor, and complain. So that marriage ended in divorce. And by that time he was heavy into the bodybuilding, natural foods, mountain biking, and hiking. And his first wife just hated everything physical and probably never broke a sweat in her life. He told me the most exercise she ever got was lifting up the phone about 50 times a day. So obviously they were mismatched from the start. Then after the divorce, on one of his trips out to Colorado, he met a natural woman. A woman that liked the same kind of things. Mountain climbing, biking, natural foods. He said she was kind of the all-American waspy woman who didn't wear much makeup, bought her clothes at the Banana Republic and from the LL Bean catalog, read books on shamans and spiritualism, and liked to go to New Age retreats at Sedona.

[09:30] And in the end that marriage didn't work out very well either because my friend had to go to California to accept a job in a high-level California brokerage house. And she wanted to live the Rocky Mountain lifestyle, so that one didn't work out either. So he ends up a hugely successful broker in California, managing accounts for some big Hollywood stars, which I'll not name right now because I think he'd be ticked off if I did. In fact, he'll probably be quite ticked off that I'm telling this story at all. And that's why I'm not using his name. Anyway, in California he got involved with a wisp of a woman. A beautiful, fragile sort of girl who had a few psychological problems, not the least of which being that she was a hypochondriac and had a standing weekly appointment with her psychiatrist for many years. But what else is new? It's California, right? Anyway, so he marries this fragile California girl and she's the kind of person who jumps

[10:15] on every fad, diet, and nutritional program that comes out. And every bestseller on spiritualism is the new Bible for her. And then she started getting fanatical about environmental pollutants. And she insisted that they sell their L.A. house because it was loaded with environmental problems, fiberglass insulation, radon gas, and all that. You know the drill. Okay, so my friend went along with that. He's got the money, as well as the patience of a saint. And he built a house in Malibu, right on the beach. Now, one of the reasons why they moved to Malibu Beach is because she told her husband, my friend, that she had all kinds of subclinical allergies and that her naturopathic doctor has recommended that every morning she wade out into the ocean every day and take a seawater enema. Now, you heard me right, a seawater enema, which was one of the weirdest things I'd

[11:04] ever heard. But I tried not to look surprised. I was just listening to my friend's story. So anyway, here's this guy's wife, a known hypochondriac with dozens of so-called subclinical allergies. A woman who jumps on every California health and spiritualism fad that comes along. And now she's taking daily seawater enemas. I mean, I've heard of coffee enemas, but seawater enemas? Did you ever take a drop of seawater and look at it under a microscope? You ought to try it sometime. And after you see about a million or two one-celled creatures squirming around with little tails, well, you should be smart enough to figure out you don't want any of that shoved up where the sun don't shine. But that's California. Okay, so anyway, she's doing all this. They're living in Malibu. She's obsessed with germs and pollution in the environment. She suddenly says to her husband, I'm not getting better in California.

[11:51] I'm getting worse. We have to go to a place where there's very, very minimal environmental contamination. And my doctor recommends Costa Rica. So being a nice and obliging guy, my friend goes down to Costa Rica, hooks up at the reliter, scouts out some land, takes photos and all that, goes back to California, gets her approval on the site, and they begin construction on this huge compound down in the Pacific beach town of Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica. And he came down for about six months to supervise the project and see how things were going. So after about a year when everything was all said, he got some really bad news from the States. It turns out his wife's allergies and her obsession with pollutants and germs was getting worse. And she ended up telling her husband that she couldn't go down to Costa Rica after all. Her naturopathic doctor had advised her against taking an airplane.

[12:39] Because in her delicate condition, the way that airlines recycled their cabin air over and over again, he told her that stagnant rebreathe air could be a huge problem for her in her fragile state. And even if she took a boat from California and went through the Panama Canal, she was sure she'd have to go back and forth and visit her friends and family in California at least three times a year. So traveling on a boat for weeks at a stretch was out of the question. And actually, my friend took it pretty good. He'd been down in Costa Rica almost a year by then, and he quickly became accustomed to the lifestyle and the weather, especially the low stress manana atmosphere. So like so many people who've been down here a while, he was hooked on Latin America. Not to mention he'd bought and built before the huge tourist and real estate boom in Costa Rica like about 15 years ago, and now his property's worth like five times what he paid

[13:27] for it. But you know, that wasn't a big issue for him because he already had money. So it's just that he fell in love with the Latin American lifestyle after he'd been working for years in the first world epicenter of ball busting stress, the kind that burned you out really quick and put you on the fast track to bypass surgery. When he came down to Costa Rica, he really shifted gears in a hurry and decided that he'd had it with the first world. He told me at that time he'd never willingly go back except if it was for a funeral or if someone in the family was really sick. But I still felt sorry for the guy, even though after he laid this big story on me, he told me he was going to stay down here in Latin America because he liked it here. In fact, he loved it. Even though alone in that great big gilded cage, the whole setup looked a little sad to me. Though on the positive side, he had a ton of money, a beautiful palace, a great location,

[14:13] and the guy had a ton of hobbies to keep him busy. His baseball, his opera, his piano, and as busy as he was, he even picked up another hobby, deep sea fishing, and ended up buying a 30-foot cruiser, and it was docked only six blocks from his house. Very convenient. And we had many a great afternoon hooking a few wahoos and marlins and amberjack tunas and grilling them up a few hours after we got on shore. Talk about fresh fish. Anyway, after that last conversation with him, I headed down to Colombia for a while, and I didn't see him again for about a year. And during that year, something tremendous happened to him again. Now of course, he ended up getting divorced from that fragile hypochondriac lady who was the one responsible for him ending up in Costa Rica in the first place. And he was the kind of guy who never said bad things about his exes, so it wasn't as if he was beating himself up over all that bad romantic luck.

[15:01] In fact, he told me that his last wife did him a huge favor. At least that's what he told me the next time I saw him. And guess what? He was married again, this time to number four. Now, at 57 years old, he says he's the happiest man in the world, and his latest bride turned out to be a beautiful 20-year-old Costa Rican girl. You heard me. I said 20-year-old. Okay, I can buy that. Down here in Latin America, there's a lot of that September spring romance stuff going around. In fact, a lot of first world guys who've had bad luck with romance up in the first world come down here after a divorce or two for just that reason. There's not only a tolerance for older guys marrying young women. And really, it's so common. You see it every day of the week down here. And when you see a beautiful young girl with a much older guy, you really don't know if the guy's her husband or her dad, unless the guy's blonde and fair-skinned and she's

[15:50] dark with jet black hair. Then you can figure it out. And nobody wonders about it or even asks. In fact, nobody even cares. In fact, it's about the only way for a young, beautiful, poor, or middle-class girl, middle-class by Latin standards, that is, like a person making that average salary of about $300 a month. Anyway, marrying an older Latin guy with a little money or an older first world European or gringo, that's a sure ticket out of a bad neighborhood and a life of struggle that's probably gone on for generations in her family. And that's just another small proof of what I call the gringo advantage. You know, that extra three points you get when you come down here from the first world? And that means, down here in Latin America, unlike in the first world, it's as if age doesn't make any difference at all. Not when it comes to love and romance. Of course, if you're a wrinkly old curmudgeonly fart, then no girl, young or old, is going

[16:36] to warm up to you. But if you keep yourself in reasonable shape, even if you're in your 50s or 60s, you don't have to rule out a 20-something love match at all. It happens all the time down here. But if you're an expat and that does happen to you, and it happens a lot, believe me, if you ever try to bring that girl back up to the first world with you, even for a visit, or even a quick shopping trip to Miami or New York, the rest of the world is going to give you some pretty dirty looks. And you'll be persona non grata with practically every first world woman you meet. And that includes all the ladies in your immediate first world family, like sisters, mothers and aunts. So just a word of warning to you expat wannabes, it's not a good idea to come down here, find yourself a young beautiful latin wife, and bring her back to the United States. Because if you do, you're asking for a load of hurt and a load of trouble. And that's not the only reason why you don't want to bring a young latin wife back to the

[17:25] United States. And I do have some stories I could tell you about just that particular problem, but I'll save that for another show. Now, I know some of you first world ladies who are listening to me right now are thinking, yeah, well, I know that can happen. You can go down to the third world and hook up with a very young girl, even if you're an old fart, but in reality, they don't really love you. They just want your status and your money. And if a guy who does that doesn't know that he's an idiot, that's exactly what first world women think because I've heard him say it myself. I've heard him say things like just look at the contrast, a beautiful 23 year old Latina and a 50 year old American guy balding twice divorced in a pot belly. Come on. Well, listen a second. I used to think the exact same thing myself. And here's how I saw it. Before I moved down here permanently and I was just down for a few weeks on vacation,

[18:11] I'd see tons of September spring relationships like that. And of course, deep down, I'd think that lucky stiff look at that young beautiful girl. She's really taken that old duffer for a ride. But then again, look at the smile on his face. But I'm serious. Once I got down here and I saw and talked to those people, I found that those girls generally love their men no matter how old they are. And I'll tell you the reason why it can't be disputed because down here it's so accepted that a man can be 5, 10, 15, 20, even 25 years older than his wife. And I'm not talking strictly about gringo Latina marriages here at all. I'm talking about older Latin men marrying much younger Latin girls. Now that's extremely common down here too. So what I'm saying is this. A lot of these Latin girls, these young 20-something girls that hook up with these older guys,

[18:58] their own fathers might be 10, 15, 20, even 25 years older than their mothers. So they grew up in a household like that where it was completely normal to have an age spread like that. Now it happened to me in my own personal experience. I went with a girl for a long time down here whose father was 25 years older than his wife. So my Latina girlfriend had no qualms at all about dating an older guy. In fact, all the while I was with her, the subject never even came up. I mean her own mother married a much older guy, right? Now you just don't see that up in the first world. Up north, that kind of stuff only happens in Hollywood. So for all you first-worlders living up there and all you ex-pat wannabes, next time you see or hear about a guy who's 20 or 30 years older than his wife down here, don't jump the conclusions and think she married him for his money and his status.

[19:43] Though that might be part of it. Most Latin girls don't get married unless there's at least some love there. In fact, I really hate saying this, but so many of my ex-pat friends down here are married to girls that are 10 or even 20 years younger than they are. Hey, if you got that gringo advantage going for you, why not? I know I might sound like a cad here by saying that, but that's just the way it is down here. And here's the real shocker. Most young Latinas I know that are married to ex-pat guys seem to really and truly love them. None of this sitting in a restaurant staring at the wall and talking to nobody or playing with your iPhone. When couples down here are in love, no matter what the age spread, they actually talk to each other. And there's a lot of eye contact going on. And for you first world guys up there, a word to the wise. Even when you do hook up with a Latin girl, one way you can surely tell that she loves

[20:30] you is that she's about a thousand times more attentive and touchy feely in public than any first world girl you've ever gone with. For example, when you see couples together in shopping malls, you don't see guys walking two foot in front of their significant other. Instead, she's right up front and close, nuzzling him and holding his hand. Down here, couples in love carry on quite differently than ones up in the first world, I'll tell you that. Even in public. And at first, it can be pretty embarrassing, especially for a first world guy who's not used to the touchy feely treatment from any girl he's ever been with in the first world. But after a while, you get used to it. And it doesn't take long, believe me, to tell if a girl's in love with you or she's just putting on an act. Latin America really is a place where the women especially take love very seriously. That is, except in those high-volume tourist areas like Costa Rica and Cancun and Xtaba

[21:19] and Playa del Carmen, Rio de Janeiro, and Panama. Just to name a few of those tourist hotspots where the ladies have been tainted by tourism and the gringo dollar. And there, the Latin men are even worse. Anyway, when you hook up with a Latin lady down there, many times she has been tainted by that gringo dollar and is specifically hanging around in the tourist spots to hook a first world guy if she can. Not that if she does, she won't fall in love with a guy, she might. But her original intent wasn't to find a guy and fall in love, her original intent was to find a guy with money and jump a few social and financial barriers. So I'm saying if you find a love match in a place like Costa Rica, she's much more likely to be insincere. And therefore, there's much less chance that there'll be a happy ending. And I know, I've seen that happen to some of my own friends down there.

[22:04] But away from those tourist areas, I almost never hear stories like that. Once again, it's tourism and the gringo dollar that does all that damage. But now, of course, you're wondering what happened to my friend down in Costa Rica. Well, he ended up marrying his 20-year-old cleaning lady and she was quite a dish. And you wonder how that can happen. Here he is, a highly educated guy, very cultured, and he ends up with a 20-year-old Costa Rican girl who cleans houses. Well, you can only imagine how that happened. Lonely guy, big house, beautiful young girl, you get the idea. But the story doesn't end there. It never does, does it? And did they live happily ever after? Well, after they got married, something strange happened. The thing is, he had this big place and he had to have people gardening and cleaning and maintaining it. And his new wife, of course, was in charge of the help. And unfortunately, she hired some of her own unemployed relatives.

[22:52] Which believe me, is always a bad precedent. You should never do that down here in Latin America because if one of them's a drunk or steals something or is just a bad lazy worker, if you fire him, you'll cause some huge havoc in the family. So you're better off laying the law down right away. No relatives working here. Okay, so he made the mistake of hiring her relatives. Then, after being married for some months, my friend noticed that there often was a little baby about two or three years old in the kitchen, just crawling around on the floor and hanging out. And the wife's aunt, who was the cook, said it was her kid and she had to bring it sometime because there was no one to watch it at home when she came over to cook. Okay, my friend could handle it, except the baby was over more and more and it cried a lot, so it was starting to get on his nerves. And when he finally laid down the law, saying that baby had to go, someone else had to take

[23:39] care of it, then his wife's aunt panicked and thought she was going to get fired as the cook. So she blurted out that it wasn't her kid at all, but was his wife's kid. In other words, dear friends, it just slipped his beautiful young Latin wife's mind. She forgot to tell him that before she met him, she had a kid. Now when my friend first told me this, I was a bit shocked, but that wasn't the end of it. Sure, my friend was shocked himself by it, who wouldn't be. Then he remembered something else that was kind of strange. A lot of times that little kid was out in the backyard playing with the gardener, and the gardener, who was about 25, would play ball with the kid, try to teach it to bat, hold it and laugh and joke with it. And sure enough, when he quizzed his beautiful young wife, who by that time was crying her eyes out like nobody's business, in the end, she admitted that the gardener, who she'd

[24:26] recommended for the job, was actually the father of the kid. And he was this handsome, unemployed, uneducated local guy, who she just thought she'd help out by giving him a job. Talk about keeping it in the family, huh? And when I heard that, I was speechless, and that doesn't happen to me often. And here's what he said in all sincerity. He said, Johnny, look, I've been divorced three times up in the first world. I'm a three-time loser. I cashed in all my chips and came down here, figuring the best years of my life were gone. But really, when you look at it, I've been given this huge second chance. I really won the lottery. So what? She has a kid. If I went back to the United States at my age, and I started dating girls up there, they'd all be in their 30s and 40s, divorced and surely with kids too, and probably more than one. So here I am, down in Costa Rica, a paradise with a 20-something wife who really loves

[25:14] me. Listen, a guy could do a lot worse. And you know, when he put it that way, I had to agree with him. Now there's a guy with a really big heart. Because guess what? He never did fire the gardener. He's still working there. And as for me, I never did have the guts to ask him that brutal question, do you think there's any hanky-panky going on with your wife and the gardener? I just couldn't ask him that. Well, there's one expat who's a better man than I am, that's all I have to say. But I notice he still works out hard and heavy one hour a day in that nice professional gym of his. And he's looking good. In fact, I'd say he's in a lot better shape than the gardener. So he's got that going for him anyway. And after that long conversation, I didn't see him for a while, perhaps another year and a half. And when I came back, he and his wife had a kid of their own. And he'd adopted the other one, which was a good thing I guess.

[26:01] But a few days later, down in Capos, I was sitting in a sidewalk cafe. And I saw this big shiny new Toyota Land Cruiser go by with the windows down. And guess who was driving? His wife. And in the back seat, were all her 20-something girlfriends who lived in laminated tin shacks down in Capos. You know, the old gang she used to hang with in high school. Well, I have to tell you, it gave me a kind of a sick feeling in my stomach. When I saw how she'd dressed and with all that gold jewelry, and how she'd suddenly become the queen of Capos, and how she really played the part. Now, I'm sure my wealthy friend doesn't care a bit about that kind of stuff. It's not even on his radar. He's at home reading books, singing opera, watching 300 sports channels, working out in his very own gold gym, and hitting line drives to a phantom baseball team.

[26:46] And I really do believe, like he said, he's the happiest guy in the world. And I'm sure his wife would never want to mess up that relationship, because then she couldn't be queen of Capos. But you see, there's a lesson in that. All expats seem to come down here with a lot more money, culture, class, and resources than the average Latin has ever seen in their lives. And more often than not, when you hook up with one of them romantically, if you don't watch out, you can create a monster. Which is why I suggest all expats should put their Latin lady wives and girlfriends on an allowance. Not that they'll spend you into oblivion if you don't put down some kind of limits. They won't. Because by and large, the girls outside the high-volume tourist areas are very low-maintenance, but it's a big temptation to spoil them to death. Which is pretty easy to do. Since for them, a big night out is Pizza Hut. South of the border, down Mexico.

[27:37] You've been listening to The Expat Files, living in Latin America, coming to you each week from somewhere south of the border. And don't forget you can email me, on anything at all about Latin America, The Expat Files at gmail.com. Once again, The Expat Files at gmail.com. See you next time. Nos vemos.