One magical summer in the City of Light and Jessica Sueiro and her family were hooked on the expat life.
Our March Adventurer Story, Adventure to Curridabat, Costa Rica, takes you on a journey from Cambridge to Paris to the Central Valley of Costa Rica.
Raised in Maine and educated at Syracuse University, the 42-year-old graphic designer and her 44-year-old accountant husband Will returned home to Cambridge, Massachusetts after their taste of expat life in Paris and immediately began plotting their getaway to a country south of the border.
“That September we set a 12-month plan and said we are going to live in another country,” Sueiro tells us. “Looking back now, I would tell anyone to give yourself a year and a half to two years to plan your move.”
She says that the family originally intended to move to France because both kids, 10-year-old Avalon and 7-year-old Largo, speak French, but they realized France was beyond their budget and started looking for a location in Latin America with a mandate that it must have a French school.
“Frankly, planning our move was less about what intrigued us and where we wanted to go and more about our budget,” Sueiro says. “I have an artist’s income and my husband was going to be starting his own business, so money had to become a big concern.”
They started looking at Central America to see what countries had a low cost of living but were also safe. Their original plan was to move to Guatemala, but it was not that safe and the infrastructure was lacking to support her online business. Costa Rica, though, met all the requirements.
“It was affordable, a French school was located in San José, the culture was interesting and my husband speaks Spanish fluently,” she says. “We really wanted our kids to have this kind of adventure, to experience nature and learn first-hand about the environment. Costa Rica had it all, plus it was safe compared with other countries we researched.”
They sold 80 percent of their belongings, put some things in storage in Cambridge and stuffed the rest in their suitcases to fly south to their new home in Curridabat, just east of the capital city, San José, in Costa Rica’s Central Valley.
