Rent a place for a few months first.
It's not for everyone.
Plenty of disillusioned gringos looking to return back to comfort, cleanliness, familiarity and English after realizing home wasn't that bad at all in the first place.
Grass is always greener yadda yadda yadda...
My brother married a Canadian Panamanian lady and moved down there for a couple of years a decade ago, up in the mountains, not Panama City. He made a couple of mistakes.
1) He felt he couldn't afford to retire in Canada with the lifestyle he wanted. This was his fourth certified marriage with a common-law or two not on the records. His mistakes preceded his move to Panama.
2) He thought he could become a developer, coordinating jobs between the locals and the gringos. He was under financed and it's hard to start a business when your own life is financially underwater.
3) His in-laws lived a different culture. They were simple poor farmers.
When people are dirt poor they don't differentiate. If someone did something for you and you rewarded them by buying them a $1000 leather jacket they would use it while mucking out the stalls in the barn. It's a jacket, not a status symbol. The concept of designer shopping is foreign to them. His S-I-L was about to use his $200 German carving knife as a machete to open a can of beans.
They took down their nearly new Camry and relatives wanted to put goats in the back seat to take to market. Why not? They fit.
4) He was rustic in his language skills. If someone said something in Spanish and everyone laughed was it a joke or were they laughing at him? Innuendo is everything and it gets on the nerves.
5) Being curious I went onto an English Panamanian newspaper and looked at the want ads get an idea of what people bought and sold. Right at the top there was a warning: Fraud is the national sport in Panama. Buyer beware.
6) He was hiring locals to help build the house and they had simple needs. Some of them lived in houses without windows. Trim work was done by machete. If a door closed and kept large birds out it was good enough. The site was getting messy and he told the workers to clean it up while he went to town. When he got back the place was spotless. Everything had been thrown in the garbage including surplus lumber and many of the tools.
7) There was little violent crime where he was but petty crime was rampant. Windows were barred, yards fenced and gated.
8) On the plus side stuff is cheap from dining out to car repairs. A cleaning lady was $2 a day. A labourer was $2 and hour and a skilled trade $4 an hour. He had some body work done on his truck for 1/10th the price of here (Quality was good). Gourmet meals were priced like McDonalds here.
9) Like many places if you come in on a parade float you end up being treated like a clown. He did like to arrive set to impress.
10) There were meeting places where the gringos got together and away from the local culture, back to what they were used to. Fitting in with the locals may be a big step down in lifestyle expectations.
It isn't for everyone. He ended up back here and moved onto the next wife.
SIL stayed down there. I think she would prefer being here but that's a longer story about weird people and bad finances.
www.immigration.ca
. Canada keeps this up and the birth rate goes down too much we will be like Japan soon. It's already starting
