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.
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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