Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are the U.S. The people in the U.S. Virgin Islands speak English as their first (and probably only) language. There are plenty of former mainlanders there who decided to stay. If you wanted a place that is 100% U.S. yet looks like (1 of 3 perfect islands), you can just buy a ticket and move there with no other hassles. It would be like escaping fully from the U.S. while not at all simultaneously.
That is the easy way to do it. I have actual books on disappearing forever and I am interested in the subject. My family tends to give them to me whatever that means. It is a long and cruel story but I simply disappeared several times about five years ago. The longest was for a month but the most damaging to family members was for three days missing. I had missing person’s reports filed in several states.
I made everyone promise never to ask where I went went and why. Most of it was innocent but had to be done in my mind. Even this simple experiment required switching out my license plates to a new state and building up enough raw cash over time to live for that long. You cannot ever use debit or credit cards in that situation. Something like a car breakdown can cause big problems too because you may not have enough cash to cover it. Getting stopped by the police is a real danger as well.
It was an interesting experiment but it really, really hurt people and they assumed that I was dead. It isn’t recommended although it did make me realize how hard such a thing would be on a large scale especially with modern data systems.
Actually there are indeed places in Asia where you can work as an English teacher with no other qualification than being able to speak it. (Taiwan, for instance.)
No familiarity with the local language is needed, no actual qualifications as a teacher required either.
Which goes a long way to explaining the fractured English you often hear from new immigrants from Asia. Some traveler ran out of cash somewhere along the shoestring trail and made a few bucks teaching English to people so eager to learn it they didn’t care about ‘qualifications’.
It never lasts though. There was time when you could do the same in Japan, but these days you need to have actual skills to get a job there.
Are you not an adult? Or are you on parole? Because I can’t think of any other reason why the police would direct you to go home. It is a free country.
I still don’t understand the OP. Several years ago I left a good job to teach English for a pittance in china. I told my family and friends, got a job via the Internet, bought a plane ticket and went. (my qualifications were that I spoke English and had a BA)
But that wasn’t “running away” in my book, that was moving. When I hear “running away,” I think of leaving one’s parents or spouse. If the OP is an adult, unmarried, I must be missing something. . . .
There are substantial subsets of people in several areas of interest – sailing, skiing, surfing, traveling, making music-- who basically live as small “g” gypsies. They get a job in the off season (or when they’re out of money) doing whatever work they can find, sleeping wherever they can, and then when the right season rolls around (and/or they have enough money again) they pull up stakes and go back to the activity they love. I’ve known a few of these types in my life, and AFAICT you must:
Not have a lot of possessions, and not care much about possessions
Be comfortable being poor by any objective standard – no retirement, little savings, no real career, minimum wage jobs where you have to not only live off your pay but save some of it too
Not believe in or be interested in any linear idea of “advancement,” either in terms of a career path or in terms of accumulating wealth and possessions.
Be very adaptable and have a fairly relaxed personality, so you can put up with a low level of certainty in life
Keep your eye on your goal, work like a freaking dog to get the money you need to go back to what you want to do; these people are not bums, far from it
Smoke pot.
Now, there are obvious plusses if you can pull off this lifestyle: These people do what they love as much as they can, and they spend their time collecting experiences instead of stuff. But it takes a certain personality and a dedication to live life without a net, and I personally could never do it.
But if it could be you: Find out what you love and go and do it. When you run out of money, get a job. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Move to Puerto Rico. Cheap, easy to get a job, and you can be on the beach every day of the year. Everyone there is friendly and the people are very sexy. The nightlife is great.
Let’s all hear it for teaching English for a pittance in China! It really is plenty easy to get into, though you won’t be making your fortune that way.
If you have some adventure in you, there is plenty to be had in Africa. Living in cheap (you won’t have a washing machine, but you can hire someone to do your clothes) and there are some beautiful places. More importantly, it’s still relatively easy to get a job with little more qualification than being an American with a BA. Finding these jobs might take some connections, but it can be done. And if you don’t have a job, even a small savings (something you could make in a summer of holding two jobs) can sustain you for some time.
I doubt that. In order to properly teach English at a school, you need to know about Grammar and pedagogy and have certificates. If you didn’t study to become a teacher anywhere, or even if you studied in some country we don’t recognize, then you have to go to German university and train as teacher.
What you can do, though, is put up a flyer on lamp posts and such like offering conversation with a native speaker for 10 Euros or similar - I see these in the area around the University here. I don’t know how good people can live on that, though.
I don’t know how much retirement/pension funds (security) you have in the US, and from what I hear, you don’t have automatic health insurance, but those are two things to take into account that “young hippies” (i.e. following their dreams or going off into exotic paradieses) often don’t think off. Together with “finding a crappy job”: that is rather easy when you’re 20, still manageable when you’re 30, difficult when you’re 40, but might be impossible when you’re 50. That’s also the time when you start to get health problems (and third-world countries are not known for best-standards medicine). And what do you do when you are worn out physically at 60, but have saved no money to retire? In a foreign country, you have neither a family network nor welfare to sustain you.
In other words, it’s nice living on the beach when the sun is shining, but what happens when it rains? (And it will, sooner or later).
That’s not to discourage you from following a dream - just ask yourself beforehand, so that you don’t rue it later. Many people never are sorry; they think following their dream was worth minor problems. Some set up a safety back home to return to. And some wake up to unpleasant things and rue that they didn’t do a couple of small steps before embarking on an adventure.
Also, there’s a reason that most people in poor countries are poor (and it’s not because they are lazy!) - it’s because the jobs over there pay less. So while food and rent is lower, you also have less money when you work there, and it might be difficult competing with the natives for a job.
Oh, and Lemur mentioned that regulations against tourists working might not be enforced if you know the right people. I’ve read this often from Germans who went to exotic countries with a different attitude towards bureaucracy - as long as you know the right people, it’s quite sweet doing things under the table. But if you don’t know the right people (because they moved/retired/advanced…), or they want a bigger bribe because as American, you must be rich - then you’re basically fucked up, because there’s no offical recourse to the unoffical system. So it’s either very sweet or much worse than the system you’re used to.
My mister and I pretty much fit this profile to a tee. We spent approx 15yrs chasing around the world consumed with wanderlust in search of the new, exciting, exotic stimulation of seeing through different eyes.
We went to wonderous places and had remarkable experiences, and, along the way learning some really important life lessons.
It’s takes very specific skills to be able to save $12,000 to take an 8 month holiday. And it takes money skills to be able to manage those funds successfully for those months with no income. You learn to live in a cash economy. We had little choice as we had no credit cards then. We knew staying free of debt was the key. Those three skills will take you surprisingly far in life.
We’re now over 50 and over 60 respectively, have a mortgage and car and what many of our friends would call prosperity and stability. There are times when it threatens to smother us, or so it seems anyway.
While it’s true we are not positioned as well as many of our friends when it comes to retirement (we’ll probably have to work part time till we’re 70!) and mortgage equity, we would neither have done a single thing differently.
I could never get my head around spending the very best of my youth toiling away at the daily grind, it just wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to sock away my money against a tomorrow that might never come, or an old age when I’d be too infirm to do anything adventurous. I wanted to go while I was young and strong enough to climb mountains or volcanoes, ride in 3rd class buses, sleep on beaches, tolerate the trials of long term travel, and while my mind was still open and rubbery, as it were.
I am so surprised someone who hasn’t lived it has so well encapsulated it, well done!
