Any location that finds favor with expats ultimately needs a place for them to hang out. There is a ready market of people who want a menu of familiar food—like burgers, hot wings, or a juicy steak—prepared in familiar ways. Put their favorite music on the jukebox, and they’ll be drawn in. Offer them NFL football or a pool table, and they’ll become good regular customers.
"Why is life better here? Well it’s warmer, I don’t shovel snow, I buy beer for under $1, I’m 10 minutes from a beach, and I play softball all year round,” says expat Jim Thomas. Jim lives in Las Tablas, a small town that serves as capital of Panama’s Los Santos province, heartland of the country’s Spanish-colonial heritage.
If you’ve decided to buy a boat and live the cruising lifestyle, you have all the same questions we did. Where do you start? What makes a good boat? How much will it cost? Where do you shop? The first thing you need to do is research. Back when Al and I bought Carina the Internet was in its infancy. We did it the old fashioned way, with print publications. Now things are much easier with a vast amount of information online.
Growing up in a small farming community in Nebraska, I had always been interested in growing food,” says Ron Miller. “And when I was older, I saw a display of how food would be grown in the future and fish would be farmed. That inspired a vision of what it would be like to grow veggies and raise tilapia fish.”
"You're starting a business where?" That's the question you'll get, over and over, when you tell your friends you've decided to pack your bags and move to Panama. They'll likely know that Panama is famous for its canal. But they may also think of Panama as a Central American "Banana Republic." Nothing could be further than the truth, of course. Thanks to the Panama Canal, this has long been a destination for international business. So Panama has always focused more on its business infrastructure than on luring vacationers.
People come to live in Panama for lots of reasons. It’s one of the world’s best destinations for retirees, and if you’re keen on running your own business, it’s got much to offer. But if your dream is to establish a winery, then most folks will tell you to look elsewhere. David Feinstein and Kersti Landeck are not most folks.
It’s hard to believe four years have passed since I moved to Panama. It’s even more incredible to think that I left the U.S. almost nine years ago. I live in David, the capital of Chiriquí Province in the west of the country. I didn’t plan to move here; it was never on my “to do” list. But when my husband, Al, and I first saw the rolling hills and slopes lined with rows of vegetable plants, acres of pineapple and rice fields, coffee plantations and orange groves, I said to myself, “This is it; this is where I want to live.”
"We decided we needed another start,” says expat Hellmut Pedersen. “Our lives in Washington were becoming too complicated. Prices kept going up, bureaucracy became more difficult, and the stress was too much. So we sold just about everything and arrived in Panama in 2005 with five suitcases.”