The Struggle is Real

Is the digital nomad life all 🌈 and 🦄 ?

Dec 06, 2024

Since November 2024, American readers may have noticed an uptick in news stories and blog posts about moving abroad. If your candidate didn’t win the Presidential election, and you saw the election of the other party as a bellwether of doom, you might have your eyes on an escape. Marketers and bloggers know that, so they are writing more about it.

One hazard of those articles is that they might present an overly rosy picture of living in another country.

Deana and I may be guilty of that as well. We mostly post only the highlights of our travel here on Substack and our Zigzag Along Facebook Page.

This problem isn’t limited to travel blogging. Instagram is harmful to some people’s mental health primarily due to digital status-seeking, and social comparison. Everyone edits their life, including their photos, to show the best version. As a consequence, we only see the highlights.

I totally understand the impulse to leave America. Life there is difficult. The cost of living is high compared to stagnating average income, and food quality is low. Healthcare costs are high. And because services and people are so spread out, it is tough to live without a car. These factors have contributed to an overall angst that affects many people and infects their relationships and decisions. I struggled to defeat this cycle while living in the States.

Our life is better in Europe. The food quality is higher. Medical care is cheaper. It is easier to live your life without a car. I am losing weight again, and my physical health has improved.

But don’t fool yourself by looking on through rose-colored Substack glasses. This life is difficult in a different way.

Twelve Places to Lay Your Head in One Month

And a scribe came to Jesus and said to him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” - Matthew 8:19, 20

Church of St. Nektarios on the island of Aegina, Greece. We were very tired in this picture.

In the last issue of our newsletter, Deana told the story of her dad dying, and our whirlwind tour of Washington state.

Once we learned we were returning to the United States for a funeral, I was determined not to get stuck in the North American gravity well. So once the funeral details were solid, I arranged our flight back to Europe.

However, two things complicated the task. First, we no longer had an apartment in Sarande, and second, we had an Airbnb reserved in Aegina, Greece, for the celebration of St. Nektarios’ feast day. We had to get ourselves back to Europe, find an apartment, and get ourselves to Athens to get on a ferry.

I quoted the saying of Jesus above because his followers were also nomads. The spiritual word is pilgrim. And you don’t really know what that kind of travel is like until you’ve done it.

From October 13th to November 13th, we slept in 12 different beds: our old apartment in Sarande, a layover in London, Deana’s brother Jon’s house in Washington, our house in Moses Lake, my parents’ home in Soap Lake, Dublin, Ireland, Corfu, Greece, our new apartment in Sarande, the port city of Piraeus, Greece, the island of Aegina, Athens, and then back to our new apartment in Sarande. We rode ferries, buses, taxis, and airplanes.

It was worth it. But it was exhausting. I don’t recommend that amount of travel in a month. We are slowmads (slow travel nomads) for a reason. We’ll leave the fast travel to the young’uns.

Construction

The cover photo for this post shows a road under construction.

Sarande, Albania, is a tourist destination whose primary season is between June and September. This city of 30,000 can boom to 300,000 in July and August.

During the elbow season, everyone is furiously working hard to prepare for the next year. Lots of construction noise and streets torn up.

When we were looking for a new apartment, we were in a bit too much of a rush, and chose an apartment without doing an adequate appraisal of the neighborhood noise.

This is the beautiful view from our apartment today.

We have enjoyed our quietest nights of sleep since a year ago, when we lived on the 14th floor of an aparthotel in Batumi, Georgia.

But our days are filled with the sounds of cement drills and saws as this building is being renovated.

We spent the last two weeks looking at apartments in different parts of the city, acquainting ourselves with unfamiliar neighborhoods. The story is the same everywhere.

While I would love it to be quieter, I appreciate the cycle of labor. It is a reminder that there are seasons to life.

Cultural Differences

The last struggle worth sharing involves adapting to different cultures.

In our European tour of 2022-2023, we almost exclusively booked our apartments through Airbnb. I highly recommend this method as a first step to slow travel because it adds a layer of safety, knowing that a company has vetted your apartment. This is no guarantee of quality; we have stayed in mediocre apartments and one terrible place. But you have recourse if something is horribly wrong.

Finding the real value of accommodations comes from renting directly. You can save anywhere from 15-50% on the cost of an apartment by renting from an agency or local person.

With this move back to Sarande following Deana’s Dad’s funeral, we unlocked a new level in the game of nomadding. When we disembarked the ferry, we had no reservation for an apartment. We took our luggage to our favorite restaurant, which graciously allowed us to leave it there, and we started looking at apartments.

As I mentioned earlier, we took this apartment quicker than we should have due to the exhaustion of too much travel. In fact, it was the only apartment we saw that day. It seemed perfect, so we took it. We are grateful to be here. But there have been problems.

The most significant issues have been cultural. The Greeks are known for doing things on their own time. The Albanians are even worse about this. Various things that needed to be fixed took weeks or a month to be fixed—not from negligence, but just a different set of priorities.

Yesterday, we got them resolved. As well as a reduction in rent.

Landlord issues are not unique to Albania. Until you leave your home country, you really aren’t aware of how much your business interactions rely on local norms that are so internalized you think they are universal. I have news for you: They are not universal.

And just because a country’s norms are different, they are no less human. If your travel goals include personal growth, you must constantly check the human tendency to judge unfamiliar behavior as coming from bad motivations. Almost always, they aren’t.