Tefas - Our new home in Playa del Carmen

Our new home in Playa del Carmen

Starting up a life as a "rich european" in Playa del Carmen is not very difficult. Even less if you speak good spanish. Prices here are so low that you can afford to spend some extra just to get something nicer, but there are also many sneaky mexicanos whom like to trick a tourist or two with high prices. The more western you look and act, the more western will the price be. Simple as that.

Finding the apartment is easy depending on the season. We started looking in early october, which is just before the hight season starts. And we had no problems really. Playa del Carmen is growing so fast that a lot of intelligent people have played their cards wisely and invested in property here. Therefor there are many, many apartments to rent. But you have to know the local tricks to find the goodies here. Searching for "rent apartment Playa del Carmen" isn't going to get you anywhere. Only a few of the available places are to find online, and those are often for tourists (like I said, the more western you act, the more you'll pay). What you have to do is get out and walk the steets in the seach for signs on the houses. And they are everywhere.

So that's what we did, and found this little beauty:

It is in the need of some... changes. I don't know where they had planned for us to put all the food that doesn't go in the fridge, for example. Or the plates. And our "stove" is a small little electric one which gives you a shock if you don't have shoes on. But it has a balcony, hot water, wifi, AC and fan. Plus, it is only three blocks from the beach and three from the supermarket. We live in the centre of the centre, downtown Carmen, with 24 hours reception and security. And for that we pay about 300 USD a month. A pretty fair price, I would say.

You can easily live here on a budget of 600-700 USD a month, incluiding apartment. The supermarket is cheap, like really cheap, but even going out to eat will cost you almost nothing. A ten pack of Corona costs for example 7 dollars and in a bar you can get one for maybe one or two dollars. If you escape downtown and go to a smaller place on a smaller street, you can easily have a dinner plus drinks for two people and pay no more than 10, 20. So our biggest difficulty here is to not live as tourists.

This is our cricket. He ran away.

We have now lived here for ten days and I still love it. We have three more weeks on the contract of the apartment, unless we choose to stay, so we will see what we'll be up to.

Vanessa