Almost Local — “The Living Abroad Story of Simo D”
Host: Mark Alcobe | Almost Local Podcast

Most people don’t fail at moving abroad because they lack courage. They fail because they made a life decision using vacation logic. That’s where Mark opened this one, and it set the tone for the whole conversation.

I walked through the actual timeline. My wife and I visited Belize in 2020 while she was pregnant with our first son. We decided we were moving. Then COVID hit, our son ended up in the NICU with meconium aspiration syndrome, our second son was born into the NICU too, and what looked like a two-year planning window was really just a holding pattern with two kids and a house renovation in it. We didn’t spend that time researching Belize. We spent it surviving Canada. In hindsight, staying put saved two lives.

We got into the honeymoon phase and what happens when it ends. I had a boots-on-the-ground trade in Canada, twenty years of contracting, and none of it came with me. At some point, you stop being on vacation and have to start living again. No family here. No friends. Careers to rebuild from zero while chasing a two-year-old and a three-year-old around a house we were still finishing. Four years in, we’re finally coming up for air.

Mark also asked me the harder questions, and I didn’t dodge them. Foreigners buying up affordable beachfront and driving prices out of reach for Belizeans is not a Belize problem; it’s a global one, and I’m on the wrong side of it. Queen’s land, the 66 feet from the high-tide line that nobody can own, and the expats who try to fence it off anyway. The Canadian in the bank ranting about how the Belizean banking system isn’t the Canadian one, while the whole room watched.

We covered the high-context communication gap that took me three years to name, and the residency office story that finally explained it. Building a social life in a transient town where the people you like tend to leave. The career pivot from construction into AI systems design, and how an LLM saw the connection before I did. Why I built MoveSmart, and the model bias I had to crack to make it stop recommending the same eight countries.

The heat is the worst part. The freedom is the best part. Both are true at once, and that’s the whole point.

You don’t solve your problems by moving. You swap them. The only real question is whether you picked a trade you can live with.

If you prefer to listen to the episode:

About Marc and Almost Local

Marc Alcobé is a designer by trade and an expat by practice. He’s originally from Catalonia, spent years working on banking and media products in Spain before moving to Germany, and now works as a senior product designer at OpenProject while living abroad himself. He started the show as Expat Experts and later rebranded it to Almost Local: Living Abroad Stories, which is a better name and a more honest one. The premise is right there in it: most of us who move never fully arrive at local. We get close. We stay close.

The show runs long-form conversations with people living abroad about belonging, identity, culture shock, and community, and it deliberately skips the visa checklists and the highlight reels. Marc asks every guest the same twelve questions near the end, covering cultural adjustment, building a social life from zero, finding a place to live, and the best and worst parts of where you landed. It’s a good format. You can’t coast through it with a tidy answer, because he’s asking the same thing of everyone and the comparisons do the work.

Listen: almostlocalstories.com | Portfolio: marcalcobe.com

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If you are looking for practical frameworks to make your move abroad smoother, check out the Moving Abroad Punchlist for systematic planning without the hype.

For straight talk, read The Moving Abroad Reality Check.

And, for a no-fluff, data-backed assessment of where to actually move to, check out MoveSmart, my AI-powered relocation tool that matches your real needs to the right country.

If you’re curious about other expat insights beyond mine, watch/listen to the Foreign Radio podcast.

Truly Expat Travel Podcast, Season 2, with Paula
Episode: “Belize: The Caribbean Paradise You Haven’t Visited Yet (But Absolutely Should)”

Paula’s premise for Season 2 is a good one: skip the holiday brochure and ask expats what it’s actually like where they live. So that’s where we went.

We started where the story actually starts, and it isn’t a beach. Our first son nearly died at birth and spent a month in the NICU. We’d been living what we thought was a safe life, and that month put the fragility of it right in our faces. We decided then that whatever we did next couldn’t be a failure; it would just be the gateway to the next thing. Our second son was born into the NICU too. That was the nail in the Canadian coffin, so to speak. Four years later, we’re still here.

From there, Paula pulled the practical stuff out of me. Why Belize and not Iceland, which my wife had also proposed. The immigration reality of spending four years here on tourist status before submitting our permanent residency application. The heat, which I badly underestimated: our second year here broke national records, over 50 degrees for days on end, eight months without rain, and my kids and I covered in prickly heat. I also explain why the answer I got to “when is rainy season?” turned out to be correct, even though it sounded like the dumbest thing I’d ever heard at the time.

We covered the things I’d actually tell a friend who was coming. Rent a car, because the bus won’t get you to what you came for. Drive the Hummingbird Highway even if you have nowhere to be. Early December is the sweet spot. A three-day itinerary that gets you an island, the ATM Cave, and a night in San Ignacio, which between them gives you a real cross-section of a country where 400,000 people speak Creole, Spanish, English, Mandarin, and Low German at each other and mostly get along. Fry jacks. Why tipping matters here when tourism is 48% of the GDP, and the average wage is about $2.50 US an hour. And two spots I don’t usually hand out: Placencia Yacht Club, and a Taiwanese dumpling place outside Belmopan.

It’s a travel episode. The useful parts are the ones that aren’t about travel.

If you prefer to listen rather than watch:

About Paula and Truly Expat Travel

Paula Barreca Barnes has been doing this a lot longer than I have. She and her husband moved to Taiwan in 2006 with three young kids in tow, and that short-term posting turned into eight postings across Asia over roughly twenty years. She built Truly Expat Travel out of it, along with a destination site for Singapore, where she was based before recently moving back to Hong Kong. The kids are grown and living in Australia now, so she’s travelling on her own terms and writing about it.

The site covers travel, hotels, airlines, and practical tips across most of the map, with an emphasis on what a place is actually like to be in rather than what it looks like in a listicle. The podcast runs on the same logic. Season 1 asked expats about their favourite holiday destination. Season 2 asks them about the place they actually live, which is a harder and more interesting question to answer.

Listen: podcast.trulyexpattravel.com | Read: trulyexpattravel.com

Subscribe now

Share

Share Unfiltered Abroad

Leave a comment

If you are looking for practical frameworks to make your move abroad smoother, check out the Moving Abroad Punchlist for systematic planning without the hype.

For straight talk, read The Moving Abroad Reality Check.

And, for a no-fluff, data-backed assessment of where to actually move to, check out MoveSmart, my AI-powered relocation tool that matches your real needs to the right country.

If you’re curious about other expat insights beyond mine, watch/listen to the Foreign Radio podcast.