I'm half Swiss half Finnish, working in Colombia for a bit over 3 years now. The first year was a semi-sabbatical. I was traveling while on and off working as

I'm half Swiss half Finnish, working in Colombia for a bit over 3 years now. The first year was a semi-sabbatical. I was traveling while on and off working as a freelancer for companies back home. Needless to say, you don't need many billable Swiss hours to have a good life in Colombia. So personally it was an incredible year. All the beautiful places, meeting tons of people, reading the books i didn't found time for before and most importantly not being tied to daily business matters. But professionally I was stagnant for the most part. Because I wasn't willing to commit too much time nor other things clients expect like availability or short deadlines, I was mostly working on rather trivial generic web development tasks. Code monkey work under palm trees. Also I realized being a Freelancer is not for me. It basically means you are running a business with everything that entails: Communications, marketing, legal, accounting, project management, etc. Many of those I don't have particular interest in or patience for. The year aptly did what it meant to do. Taking a year off from 9-to-5 jobs while not having to spent savings. But career wise I was pretty bored by the end of it. The last two years I have been working for a startup in Bogotá that is part of a company builder that creates businesses from scratch for the growing middle class in Latin America. While I don't have that many exciting adventurous stories about my personal life to tell at the moment, I do thoroughly enjoy living here and work wise I have never learnt as much in so little time since I started my career 10 years earlier. Exclusively communicate in foreign languages. Vastly different market and mindsets than my country. Having to re-assess things I though where "universal truths" just because I saw them over and over again in Switzerland or similar nations. Balancing tech budget for cloud services whose pricing is aimed at rich western countries. Dealing with much lower end mobile devices and low quality networks. So the whole 3 years have been extremely valuable personally and professionally in terms of experience and knowledge gained. Money wise less so. But I'm young enough and don't have family to take care of, that this is not much of a worry for now.