Thread: My Baja trip
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Old 02-07-2013, 04:20 PM
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cmac2012 cmac2012 is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Redwood City, CA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kerry View Post
Very cool. Thanks for posting. What's the cost of living down there?
Not as reasonable as you might think. Baja is sort of like an island, especially the southern tip which is about the only part that has much water, except for the northern border areas. Everyone told me that the mainland is cheaper, but then it's more crowded also. The good restaurants are about 70% of what you would expect here and the places where locals eat about 50%.

Seems like you can build a house for about half of what it would cost here, owing to the low cost of labor. But you have to be careful. Some of the finishing work is rough. I speak as a finish carpenter so my standards might be a bit high but I'm telling you, a lot of the tile work I saw was attractive at first glance but rough upon closer examination.

My friend's shower has a couple of chronic puddles in it - which lead to mildew - from the lack of attention to that detail. Not hard at all to make a gently sloping floor and then tile that. A friend of her's kitchen has really uneven tiling on the counters and generally poor quality control. I'm almost tempted to try to start a company where I use local labor that I coach on better standards. Would need to watch them well though.

Probably not the best idea as about as many people leave as come in so there are a lot of places on the market. It's an attractive scenario though my take is that people often find it more difficult than they thought. I want to get high proficiency in Spanish before I try it. And then work on my Spanish with the natives.

My friend is cool, but we've been platonic for too long for anything to take off and she's 7 years older than me anyway. Some of the local ladies however, whoa, ĦAy, caramba!
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