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6 month travel on home rental income

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wombat9:
Hello!

My wife and I are getting ready to embark on a 6 month adventure to Latin America. We took leave from our jobs and plan to survive on the $2000/month rental income from our HCOL condo. I plan to enlist a friend to be a local/backup point of contact for my tenants, but not hire a property manager since I will be available by text & email most of the time. We are starting in Cartagena, Colombia, then working our way through Panama, and ending the trip in San Jose, Costa Rica.
Our goal for the trip is to become as proficient in Spanish as possible. We are signing up for language classes at almost every stop. We've started using Duolingo & Mango to learn as much elementary Spanish as possible prior to the trip.

Does anyone have any experience doing something like this? Learning-Vacation / Mini-retirement.
Any recommendations are welcome (activities, sites to see, places to stay, language schools to use, food to eat, etc.)

Bicycle_B:
1. I have visited friends from USA who moved to Latin American countries. Depending on how long you visit, and what size location, many cities have "expat" clubs of various sorts. Another clustering point is churches - often there will be a church that focuses on expat congregations, functioning as an expat club as much as a church. Visiting these, communicating with their contact people, or meeting up with a few of their members when visiting a city can give you many tips from an expat's perspective. It's up to you to decide whether this method gets you more or less of what you want than simple tourist-ing or immersion, but possibly using it as one of your several ways to explore a city can deepen/broaden your experience. Perhaps it could prevent/solve unexpected problems as well. Bonus - they're not natives, but many club members are interesting and worldly in their own right.

2. When in doubt, a visit to the old center of town and the famous museum of the area are good things to do. It's a limited slice, but still a good thing to do if you are visiting a place. If nothing else, it gives you something to talk about with locals, and assures them that at least you did that amount of homework/showing of interest. Often the places are legitimately informative and fascinating.

3. Load translation programs onto your phone. To overcome lack of cellular connections, make sure one or two apps are on the phone itself, able to function offline. Google Translate worked best for me, but check reviews and try whatever you think is best.

To illustrate: My language skills are limited, but one time when my host fell sick, I explored the city "solo" interspersed with a couple of visits to new acquaintances. The acquaintances spoke Spanish plus 5% English; me, English plus 1% Spanish. It wasn't enough. What saved the day was dictionaries and translation programs. Mode A was an incident where Miss Acquaintance and I basically spoke through a translation program, typing into a computer to communicate 90% of the ideas, plus lots of facial expressions and expressive noises to fill in the emotional connection. Mode B was to use our few words as best we could when walking/talking, then look up a word or phrase on a phone to use as the pivot of the next bit of communication. Not as effective, but reasonably so, and much more mobile. Without some key, would have been dead in the water. Case C, friend's roommate, had English at least as good as my Spanish. We began using Google Translate to supplement our broken Spanglish, hand waving and smiles/laughter. We were able to enjoy conversation well for 30-60 minutes at a time. Adding good translation a few minutes at a time by our host let us finish more complex attempts that we failed at on our own.

4. In places with bus systems, they're like a nearly-free immersion tour. Highly recommend.

PS.

5. There are language schools that offer room, board and teaching all in a package that I think fits your budget. Use Google wisely, you'll find them.  Up to you whether you want to travel, or use such a school as home base.

6. I bet in a lot of places, you could get more for your money by offering locals to trade your teaching of Englsh conversation for their teaching of the local language. But I guess it depends on who you find, how you handle it, and how good you are at making all of the living arrangements.

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