As of today we have officially been here two years and four months to the day (not that I’m counting…) and man have we got stories. I think we could write a book at this point. Lately the title of said book wavers between:

Hey, it could be worse

and

What were we thinking?

But again, at least we keep it interesting. We (my hubby and I) started this little blog as a way to share our stories and life in Chile with our moms all you interested web surfers out there.

this is me and hubby and one of our crazy dogs, Japhy

First things first – this is not a travel blog. Travel blogs are great. They transport you to beautiful places, show you amazing photos taken with expensive cameras and overall make the reader extremely, extremely jealous. This is no such blog. What it is though, is a real account of our time spent here in Chile trying to carve out a life for ourselves. And all the ridiculousness that happens along the way.

Here’s the short version of how we ended up here.
As we both caught the travel bug early in life (and have an incredible aversion to desk jobs,) my husband and I decided to move abroad after we got married in 2009. With money saved up from running hubby’s parent’s farm in our pockets (literally, it was a nerve-wracking flight) we landed in Santiago ready to buy property, build a little cabin and start a small business. The fact that we had no jobs, not much money and knew relatively little about the country seemed not to faze us. Ah, ignorance.

us being happy and naive shortly after arriving

So you might be thinking, “why start writing now after two and a half years there?” Valid point. Well, having recently decided that this will be our last year in Chile, I feel like I now have enough perspective to talk about what this has been like. I’m going to try to write from the middle of our story (that being now) and jump backwards to explain the beginning when necessary. Here it goes.

this is the house my husband built with no power tools