How to Vagabond Like an Epicurean: Building Our Nest
Choosing a Location, Renting an Apartment, Making Travel Arrangements & Interior Redesigning!
Depending on one’s prerequisites for comfort, designing your travel plans to another country can be deliberately “footloose and fancy free,” or as meticulously crafted as one so desires. However, as Epicurean Vagabonds, when we decide to live somewhere for several months, the rules of engagement change substantially. We have certain requirements, needs and wants that have to be satisfied in order to insure that we aren’t just tourists passing through, but actual residents (at least on a temporary basis).
So, you may ask, what exactly do we look for when preparing to relocate for a prolonged stay in a new location? How do we select the place? What route do we take to get there? What apartment do we rent? What do we do when we get there? How do we “build our nest?” Let’s dive in!
Choosing a Location:
We aren’t the type of travelers who close our eyes and randomly put a finger down on a map. When deciding where to live for an extended period of time, our single most important criterion is cost. It should be somewhere interesting but it also better be cheap! We may have expensive tastes but we’re still vagabonds. We need to stay somewhere we can afford to stay for an extended period of time and really dig in. The next factor is familiarity. Do we want to go somewhere familiar to revisit, re-explore, and dig deeper into the city or country? Or do we want something completely unfamiliar, a new challenge? Last, but certainly not least, it must be a country that either produces or sells wine!
Renting an Apartment:
So, once we’ve decided on where we’d like to visit, we proceed to the conditions that must be met in order to satisfy both our practical and Epicurean needs. High on the list are several requirements:
An apartment with a very strong internet connection for work. Ryan Elston teaches English online 5 days a week, so he has to have a reliable, high-speed internet connection (which we always verify beforehand with the owner).
A king-size bed. Most listings just say “double bed” (which we know from experience can mean just about anything), so we always message the owner to ask for the exact measurements. We’re two big people and we need room to toss and turn.
An elevator if the apartment is above the 2nd or 3rd floor. Never assume there’s an elevator, even on the 8th floor. And while we could use the exercise, the prospect of carrying heavy bags of groceries and a six-pack of bottled water up 7 flights of stairs on the daily offends our Epicurean sensibilities.
A neighborhood that’s neither touristy nor bougie but off the beaten path, where locals live, eat and shop. It can’t be too far from the center of things either. We like to walk as much as possible without having to rely on cabs or public transportation.
Affordable grocery stores, open-air markets, pharmacies and wine shops within walking distance.
A modern television screen (preferably large) with an HDMI port.
A large table where we can both work (preferably with comfortable chairs).
A decently sized, fully-stocked kitchen with a stove, an oven, cookware, ample counter space and a full-size refrigerator with freezer (we have, under duress, managed without one or more of these things for shorter stays).
Trav’lin Not so Light:
Getting from one location to another for us can be, shall we say . . . cumbersome. Unlike the melancholy song that Billie Holiday crooned so expressively, we are not “Trav’lin Light.” If you missed part one of this series and want to know exactly what that means, check out the first article in this series: “How to Vagabond like an Epicurean: What’s in Our Luggage?” (We tend to carry a lot of stuff.) Bearing that in mind, once we’ve selected a location based on the criteria above, we’re quite strategic when it comes to deciding how to navigate getting from point A to point B.
By Plane:
If we’re crossing continents this almost certainly means flying, although we do harbor a wistful longing for the woebegone days of traveling on a luxury ocean liner with a multitude of matching trunks, stacks of hat boxes, a personal valet and lavish champagne dinners at the captain’s table.
But . . . we’re vagabonds. If we do have to fly, we begin by dumping the non-essentials from our bags so we can actually check our luggage without paying extra for them being so grossly overweight (again, see here for an explanation). Then we set about creating a flight route that suits our sensibilities and doesn’t have us in the air for 14 hours. Just . . . cannot . . . do . . . it . . . anymore. This requires some major research. In my mind, this kind of planning often resembles what is depicted in TV crime shows — the camera zooms in on a pair of grim-faced, red-eyed detectives huddled together, mugs of coffee in hand, staring intensely at a bulletin board plastered with photos, scraps of paper and a latticework of yarn.