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I moved to Asunción, Paraguay 6 years ago, after having been here twice for language-learning-vacations. It took about 3,5 month to feel fluent but I will learn
by softwarerero 12y ago
I moved to Asunción, Paraguay 6 years ago, after having been here twice for language-learning-vacations. It took about 3,5 month to feel fluent but I will learn more language and culture all my life. I came from central Europe and enjoy the warmer weather and the relaxed live style. I put all my stuff in a container and paid about 7.000 USD to including all the packing which I never could have done that well myself, I also could live back home normally until 2 days before I moved. One monitor crashed on the way but the insurance payed for it. I live in a nice apartment of about 2.000 square feet with 24 hours guards, janitor and gardener for 1.000 USD/month.
Good education is expensive here. I meet later today with some US embassy workers and will ask what they pay for their kids.
I want to stay here and planning a marriage, it is really difficult to get a Paraguayan girl to live far from family for a long time. People here are extremely family oriented.
I thought it would be easy to find a job here as a Java/Groovy/Smalltalk/C++ developer, but it was not. You can find work here if you are into M$ technologies or maybe PHP. You will work many hours on boring projects and get paid almost nothing. If you work with a cooler tech stack there is no market here. Since I am here I have learned Scala, object oriented databases, search engines like Lucene and Elasticsearch, node.js and Meteor. All of that is not in use in the country. Finding remote work has never worked for me and only once I found a project for two month in Berlin. A friend who a Java developer is still employed by a German company and moved to rural Paraguay, he is married here and plans to become old here.
Living costs easily doubled since I am here. The quality of life is higher in some areas and lower in others, it always comes down to the compromises one is willing to make.
Last week I helped a guy from Tennessee to get his residency. A friend met him on a flight from Miami to Sãu Paulo, he wanted to get a second passport as an insurance to the limitations on civil rights going on in the US. We ran around for 4 days to get all the papers and seals the government asks for and now he has to wait for 90 days to get his permanent residency. After that he still has to apply for an ID card which will probably take another month.