Life Transplanet

We have some goals for our trip in March to Puerto Rico. Most obviously, we want to look for a property to buy in the western side (Aguada, Rincon, Mayaguez area). This is difficult because in Puerto Rico there is no MLS (multiple listing service), so you have to go with various real estate agents to see houses and you have to look all over the place. The best place we have found so far online is Clasificadosonline. It seems that most Puerto Ricans haven’t gotten too much into Craigslist, which I think is an absolute necessity here in Colorado. But Clasificadosonline pretty much fills that need in PR.

Anyhow, it is difficult to gauge the market in PR because of the lack of MLS or central resource of properties. Plus, a lot of people sell as the owner without a real estate company involved at all. We are planning on seeing a house with a real estate agent (Jose Marti Realty) and asked if we could see others with him, including others he has listed and he tried to sell us a house-hunting service! ! For like $500 a day just to drive around with the realtor! That is ridiculous. I can’t imagine it is such a seller’s market that they are discouraging possible buyers through this “service”.  If I were selling my house, I wouldn’t put it through this company just for that reason alone.

So our main goal is to find a place that works with what we are looking for (a little bit of land and a comfortable house that we can rent out a portion of, not too far from the beaches and a town) and put in an offer. We would like to close on it this year if possible. We are not sure if we would be moving out right away or what, but we would like to have a property ready for us.

Other goals include meeting some of our blog friends and enjoying Puerto Rico as we always do. We are flying in to San Juan, although I am getting very tempted to fly into Aguadilla, but we just never have before. Then from there we are taking a rental car to Rincon where we are staying as roommates with two women who rent out their house in that way. We talked with one of them on the phone and she sounds like she will help us out in finding a place as well.

We also found this great reggae musician, Mishka, and so we plan on listening to a lot of his music in the rental car while we are driving around.

Vintage style Puerto Rico Adversting

Britton and I have been watching the show “Mad Men” lately and have found it pretty interesting to see the changes in what was normal from the early 60s to now. The most noticeable of course is the rampant smoking and drinking in the office and really anywhere, but also the sexism, racism, and lack of safety for kids (in one scene the mother has a minor accident and the small children are flung into the floor of the car, in another the kids are playing around with plastic bags over their heads). However, while there are a lot of things that have changed as a result of research, laws and social norms evolving, some of this period still seems magical to me. The books When I was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago, The Time it Snowed in Puerto Rico by Sarah McCoy, The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson and Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner were all set in that fascinating time.

So, anyway, when I saw that the Puerto Rico Tourism Company was modernizing an advertising campaign that connected both the Mad Men style advertising with a refreshed artistic look at Puerto Rico, I was intrigued. Apparently, as the NY Times article relates, a young “unknown” photographer by the name of Elliott Erwitt was sent to Puerto Rico in the late 50’s/early 60’s to cover an ad campaign about Puerto Rico for the Madison Avenue Company Ogilvy and Mather. Now, 50 years later, he has gone back to do it again as a well-established and esteemed photographer. The website: http://www.seepuertorico.com has many of the photographs as well as video of his time there. While it is mainly centered on the San Juan area, I think it is a beautiful portfolio of how much things have changed and how much they remain the same.

I sent Britton this link about Puerto Rico. I signed up for electronic updates about Puerto Rico from the New York Times so I occasionally see something in there about PR.  I thought Britton summed it up perfectly well with his comment:

I couldn’t even scrape the frost off my windshield this morning.  The -4 degree temperature seems to make a super bond with the frost and the glass.  It was worse than the blue countertops!

Whiskey and fresh coconut water in the warmth of PR sounds good about now.  So does live salsa and alcapurrias.

Sometimes I think maybe people think we are escapists. Well, I am reading a new book called Getting Stoned with Savages about a young couple who move to and live in the South Pacific and I thought his sentiments exactly:

“I have been called many things in my life but if there has been one constant, one barb, one arrow flung my way time after time, it is the accusation that I am, in essence, nothing more than an escapist. Apparently this is bad, suspect, possibly even un-American….Escapism, we are to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperment, and like so many -isms, is to be strenuously avoided.  How do you expect to get ahead? people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn’t want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away. I understand this, for I am an unapologetic escapist.”

-From Getting Stoned with Savages by J. Maarten Troost

We may be escapists but we can’t wait for our Puerto Rico dream to come true.

My mom read and recommended that I read a book entitled The Time it Snowed in Puerto Rico by Sarah McCoy.  Of course knowing that I love anything about Puerto Rico, I went to the library right away to pick it up. When I heard the title, I thought it was referring Doña Fela the famously popular first female mayor of a capital city in the Americas who brought in snow on an airplane to show the children of Puerto Rico who had never before seen or played in snow.

Felia Rincon de Gautier AKA Doña Fela

But, no, this book was not about that. It is a touching story along the lines of When I was Puerto Rican by Esmerelda Santiago or The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. A young girl named Verdita is in the awkward phases of moving from a child to an adolescent and trying to assert herself as an individual and become a woman. She is also in the transition between loving and hating the U.S. and fights for her independence at the same time that Puerto Rico tries to find its place in the independence movement.

The story takes place in the rural mountains of Puerto Rico in the early 60s. Some of the scenes are truly Puerto Rican such as when she goes (against her father’s wishes) to a cock fight -pelea de gallos or when she innocently learns what a puta is in the traditional sense of gender roles. It is lyrical and beautifully written. I could picture it all the way down to the homemade piraguas that snowed all around her.

So we’ve been looking for properties in Puerto Rico online for a while now. We’ve found a few that we are pretty interested in, but it really depends on what we are looking for in a property.

1) On the one hand, I could see buying a property that we could both live in and use as a guesthouse to earn income. It would be fun to live in the same place that you work! A gorgeous tropical guesthouse with a pool, ocean views and a couple of acres. Most of these are very expensive. In fact, they are between 2 and 3 times the cost of a single family home (like the second example).

A Guesthouse Possibility with ocean views (thanks Nick and Miri for checking it out!)

2) On the other hand, I could see just a single family residence with about 1-2 acres of land that is about 5-10 minutes from town and the beaches. I would like to have enough land that we could grow fruit, have a vegetable garden and some chickens, maybe start a CSA or small farm.

Small House with about 1 1/2 acres near beaches/town

3) Then, there are beachfront properties which are about as much as an inland guesthouse (double to triple the cost generally of the smaller houses). They are pretty cool, but never have much land (usually less than a 1/4 acre) and I’ve heard the maintenence costs are higher due to the sea salt and higher levels of hurricane and tropical storm damage. Plus, they are not usually set-up to be used as guesthouses and we wouldn’t be able to afford them just to live in.

Beachhouse -Beachfront property

4) There are also other properties like the one we put an offer in on in Lares that is very remote in the high mountainous jungle, but with quite a bit of land. For example, for about the same price (approximately $150k) as the second example -a 1 1/2 acre 3 bd/2 bath house in Aguada that is 10 minutes to the beach like the second picture, we could buy a property with between 6-15 acres, two dwellings and natural springs or wells. The downside? About an hour to the beach and the rest of civilization.

Country House on 6 acres

At this point we really need to hone in on our “dream house” or goal because if you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s hard to know if you’ve found it. With our houses here in the Greeley area, we knew what we wanted; for our personal residence: a single family home, two car garage, 3 bed/2bath (that is now 4 bed/3 bath due to basement finish), AC, fireplace, walk-in closet and a view. When we bought it, it didn’t have AC, a fireplace or even a yard, but it had the basics to make it nice (and now has everything we originally wanted). Same thing with the two rentals. Small, nice single family homes, two car garages, 3 bed/2bath in town.

I just recently finished reading Ben Stein’s book called “How Successful People Win: Using Bunkhouse Logic To Get What You Want in Life” and the very first premise is very logical.  Know what you want. Then, ask for what you want and work to get it.  Our idea of what we want is still fuzzy and vague.

After the Lares deal fell through we contemplated whether or we would have enjoyed living there or not.  I was reading XN’s blog, and noticed that she wants to live in the San Juan area when she moves to Puerto Rico from the New York City area. It made me think that maybe what we are looking for in Puerto Rico is similar to the life we know here, because we are very certain that we don’t want to live in the San Juan area, just as we are certain we don’t want to live in the Denver area–it’s just too big.

So, I’ve also lived in a super small town growing up (300 people) and I think I would be more comfortable in a remote area, but Britton has always lived in Greeley, a mid-sized (~90,000 people) city. I think for that reason, I loved the Lares property more than Britton did/does. However, I also like living in Greeley, so I think I would like something similar to what we have now: a mid-sized agricultural area where we could ride our bikes, garden, and raise chickens but would like a little more land, and a lot less cold in a totally new (Puerto Rican) culture. Not too close, not too far away, as the real estate agents like to say. That is getting closer to knowing what we want, but still is pretty vague.

Maybe it means taking another trip out there with the sole intention of finding another property that just feels right, putting in an offer and taking the dive…What do you think? Did it take you a while to find the perfect spot? Do you think finding a mirror area (similar size, amenities, lifestyle, etc) is smarter than finding something dramatically different? What’s your story?