Originally Posted by
Panay
Much of it exists in a time warp. Not only do you get to do a culture jump and escape the here and now of your own 21st century national culture, but when you walk through a few aeroplane doors, you end up in a place where you can choose the levels of technology and lifestyle complexity if you live there for a longer while.
I live there with my living partner, doing two stints of three months @ yearly, with breaks of 2 to 4 months in between. She is comfortable with that and so am I because we phone and e-mail frequently, and both stay busy improving our integrated lifestyle. Our lives stay interesting and absence does make the heart grow fonder. If I brought her over..... it'd destroy alot of things that make the relationship and our lives as good as they are. The cost is some away-time.
Due to the fact that the COL is so low there, I can take on the obligation of providing for rent & utilities for 12 months of the year. She stays busy with her vending job, raising pigs, overseeing a jeepney franchise and improving the land and house. We're not interested in living in a mansion, like many expats I know here. I rent in a gated community for convenience and location, but we build our own places where her uncles live. That rent money helps support her in my absence and allows her to function as financially independent and vaults her into the upper-middle class social strata. Something she'd likely not accomplish in my country, seeing she's already in her middle 30's with 2 children.
The Islands and its' laggging economy are a strange place, but it does allow an average, hard-thinking man to find a new variety of lifestyle opportunities. It's a 'frontier' in that sense.