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Do you know that out of a hive of bees, there is a small percentage whose job is to explore new flowers? Sometimes they don’t come back. It’s risky, and they have to be creative. The rest of the hive just treads the same familiar winds to the same safe flowers day in and day out, or waits until maybe they get a shot at the queen (and we all know how that turns out).

Colombia’s Independence Day was Monday, and as I got off the phone advising a friend about their upcoming relocation to Portugal, it made me doubly reflect on mine.

Every relocation story you've ever read starts with a choice. Usually. Some of us, well, we are not so usual. If you are not, welcome to the club. Maybe it’s a club of neurodivergence, but it’s a good club and sometimes it takes the different and the risk takers to try something new, and report back.

Our mascot here at ATN is a Rio, a hummingbird, who also goes looking for that sweet nectar. Ain’t no coincidence.

Usually, when people move, they research. They make lists of positives and negatives. They scan whatever today’s version of Lonely Planet is. They get their affairs in order. I do recommend doing that even if it was not the way I did it.

In December of 2019 I visited Medellín for what was supposed to be a three-hour tour. Well, more of like a three-month tour but I can never get Gilligan out of my head when I tell this story.

March 2020 I was in Medellín with a return ticket, and then there were no returns. The airports closed and I was married to a city I'd never proposed to.

I have been reflecting on this because this week is Colombia’s independence day and I feel thankful to the country for giving me a good base to pause for a moment so I could build all this.

I want to tell you why that accident taught me more about choosing a place than fifty countries of choosing ever did.

Here's the model most of us use to pick a life abroad, whether we admit it or not: infatuation. You visit somewhere for two weeks. The city, like anyone on a first date, is performing. You see the golden-hour version: the café, the view, the exchange rate doing flattering math on your savings.

You fall in love at first sight and you move. Lisbon. Bali. Mexico City. Tulum, God help you.

Then it turns out she was just hiding the baggage, or your rose-colored lenses were too thick to know any better.

And you know the statistics on love at first sight. Eighteen months later, the honeymoon's over, the things that charmed you now grate, and you're back on the app, swiping cities again. The nomad world is full of serial monogamists who've "done" thirty countries and committed to none. I was one of them. Professionally, even.

The pandemic took the swipe away from me. Circumstance made the match, nobody asked my opinion, and I signed a lease out of necessity with a city I barely knew. An “arranged marriage,” in every sense except the ceremony.

So I did what people in arranged marriages have done for centuries: I learned her. Put the highlight reel away and learned the actual person. The bureaucracy like a giant armed guard who is ticklish if you know where the chink in the armor is. The weather patterns, the rain that arrives at four p.m. like it has a standing appointment. Up and down the Dunning-Kruger curve we glide.

The Spanish that went from embarrassing to functional to good enough to argue with a taxi driver, which is the only fluency exam that counts.

Somewhere in year two, without my permission, I fell in love. Not the infatuated kind. The kind that comes after you've seen the flaws and stayed anyway. Seven years later, it's my second home.

Now, the uncomfortable part. I write a newsletter whose entire tagline is "Don't Escape. Design." And the best life decision I ever made, I didn't make. For a while that felt like a crack in the thesis. It's actually the foundation of it.

My “accident” exposed that infatuation is a research method with a near-total failure rate. The information you actually need about a place is this: can I be bored here, can I be sick here, can I build something here, who am I on a random Tuesday in month fourteen, is structurally unavailable during the audition period. It only surfaces after the honeymoon. And the swipe model guarantees you leave before it does.

The arranged marriage worked because I was forced to do the thing I'd skipped in forty-nine other countries: stay through the unglamorous middle, where the real information lives.

Which means design was never about picking the perfect city. There is no perfect city, for the same reason there's no perfect spouse. What you choose is a set of problems you're willing to work with. And for some, some problems are more tackleable than others. Design is what happens after the match. It's the language you actually learn instead of gesturing at. The visa path you build instead of border-running. The neighborhood you know by its sounds.

The escape fantasy says the right place will fix you on arrival. The infatuation model says keep swiping until the feeling lasts. Design says: pick a reasonable match with your eyes open, then do the work that makes it right.

My recommendation is not to wait for a pandemic to run all this for you, as it did for me. But just hear what I learned from that, which is to stop auditioning cities and start committing to one for long enough that it stops performing for you and starts telling you the truth. Through the boring stretch. That's when you'll know.

Some cities are better to visit. Paris was a great city to visit; Portugal might be better to put in a life. When you stop going to dinner and learn how grocery stores work. When you learn how to pump gas (because, weirdly, it’s different everywhere).

I got lucky. The world trapped me somewhere worth loving. But luck isn't a strategy, and you shouldn't need a locked border to commit.

Don't escape. Design.

🇧🇷 Brazil - Americans lost visa-free access to Brazil in April 2025 on reciprocity grounds, since Brazilians have never had visa-free entry to the U.S. The e-visa is easy and 10-year valid.

🇰🇷 South Korea - The Digital Nomad (Workation) F-1-D visa officially launched June 30 with eased eligibility, lowering the income threshold based on age and region of residence after a two-year pilot. Seoul and Busan are now fully in play as long-stay destinations.

🇪🇸 Spain - Still one of the best digital nomad setups in Europe: the visa requires roughly €2,849/month for a single applicant as of 2026, renewable up to five years, with a path to residency that most other nomad visas don't offer.

🇵🇹 Portugal - Processing times are finally improving after years of AIMA backlog, but citizenship eligibility is now 10 years for most applicants under the 2026 nationality law. The passive check-writing era is over here too.

🌍 EU / ETIAS - Still on track for Q4 2026 rollout, with full enforcement in early 2027. When it lands, Americans and other visa-exempt travelers will need a €20 pre-authorization before any Schengen entry. Start paying attention now.

Check your target country’s official immigration page for exact income thresholds and application windows. They move quickly.

Two brothers, one dead father, and about four hundred pages of people failing to say what they mean to each other. That's the plot. The command of relationship psychology is as deep as anything I’ve read without ever being too on the nose.

Intermezzo follows two brothers in the aftermath of their father's death. Ivan, a 22-year-old former chess prodigy, and Peter, a human rights lawyer navigating relationships with both his younger girlfriend and his ex. No heist, no war, no shooting. Just grief, sex, chess, and conversation. Rooney keeps proving you don't need big set pieces or tragic mayhem to comment on something trending, to comment on humanity.

The New York Times called it something close to admirable without reservation, noting Rooney writes about love's permutations as well as anyone alive. NPR called it her most fully developed and moving novel yet and less disturbing than Normal People, if never exactly sunny. It became the fastest-selling book in Ireland, which tells you the readers and the critics are, for once, mostly reading the same book the same way.

What gets me is the sentence-level control. Short. Clipped. Sometimes no subject at all. It reads like thought before it's been tidied into grammar, exactly how grief and infatuation actually happen in your head. Just two brothers who love each other badly, and a writer who trusts you to sit in the discomfort instead of resolving it for you.

If something in here stayed with you, pass it on. The right essay finds the right person. Help it along.

See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.

Ask Birdbrain GPT (Powered by Yours Truly, Rio)

Rio is a hummingbird who's been everywhere and trusts almost nothing he reads online. Ask him about visas, nomad life, or whatever the travel blogs are getting wrong this week.