Welcome to Eat Baila Travel we are Jenny and Kevin if this is your first time joining us we
are two Mexican Americans that decided to move from Chicago to Mexico in the year 2021.
In the beginning of the year in January we started by exploring our options in Veracruz we also lived in
Yucatan for a month in Oaxaca in Quintana Roo and we made our way through central Mexico we're still
taking our time exploring the rest of the country and taking advantage of travel opportunities in
the meantime but along the way we're reflecting on specific cities as potential candidates for
our future home so today we want to do the same for Puerto Vallarta and to be fair to evaluate our
candidates fairly we're going to be using the same six pillars to reflect on whether or not we want
to live here and those are the size of the city safety climate food health and fitness and dancing
if you want to see our reviews for other areas of Mexico you can check out our chicago new mexico
series where we've reviewed horizon Merida Queretaro and more cities as potential homes
today we're in puerto vallarta and we thought we were just coming on a mini vacation to Puerto Vallarta
well we we've been here we liked it we've been here three weeks now a couple more weeks been
planned and we really like it surprisingly i just thought it was going to be a tourist location and
i didn't think that i would really consider it as home but that's the nice part about traveling
and and kind of going with no expectations and I've heard that many expats or other foreigners
live here in Puerto Vallarta but I don't know i just hadn't it hadn't really crossed my mind as an
option for me and i've been pleasantly surprised so right off the bat we'll start off with number
one and that's size we're looking for a mid-side city coming from a large city from chicago
we're looking for something right in the middle and surprisingly enough puerto vallarta is
small city it has about 300,000 people living in it it just feels so much bigger because of the
tourism and the resorts the hotels when they're busy this the city of puerto vallarta is also busy
it has a lot to offer in terms of variety and groceries health care so a city of this size it's
also important to have good infrastructure it's got a reliable transportation system you've got
buses 10 pesos for a bus ride there's uber um and taxis are great too so but it's also very
walkable we walk a lot we barely use taxis or ubers we use the bus mostly um in our beach
so um it's very walkable um and it's pretty safe so actually that brings us to number two safety
the women that we've met have told us that they feel safe walking around the streets at any time
of day people have mentioned that it's also safe to walk around at night we've never felt any sense
of danger or just unsafe so i really appreciate that about the city it's nice the only thing with
safety i would say is that at night uh it looks a little scary because in terms of clean cleanliness
it's not the cleanest it's not the cleanest that's the city that we've been to so it makes it look a
little sketchy in certain areas mostly because people place their garbage outside in the front
garbage pickup is done in the streets in the front of the house so it's very common to see
piles of garbage bags and that's i mean that's a little unpleasant for me i guess but not
not like the biggest deal another thing that we found very interesting and cool
in Puerto Vallarta is that they have a large LGBTQ community and apparently it's like a
worldwide travel destination for lgbtq people so I thought that was really cool and in terms of I
guess while we're on the topic of safety not only is it safe for people of lgbtq it's also super
super welcoming super friendly uh it's got a really cool vibe there's some really awesome
drag shows it's a really cool vibe so i thought that was cool to mention also the weather during
our stay in Puerto Vallarta in the month of november december was perfect it was about 80
85 degrees in the day and like 70s upper 60s at night so the weather at this time was perfect
obviously we're not going to go based off the weather November and December
but it was nice it was enjoyable puerto arta sits on the second largest bay of the world
and it's surrounded by mountains that go up to 6,000 feet so it's fun to walk in Puerto
Vallarta and the fact that there's surrounded by mountains just beautiful views while you walk
we love a city that's not flat and hikable there's so many things you can do in terms of hiking
but from what we researched overall the average temperature in Puerto Vallarta
sits at a high of 85 and a low of 70 throughout the entire year which is pretty consistent with
what we experienced but the thing that we really want to investigate more is summers because
a lot of people had have told us that it is super super human here hot and humid but
what we research doesn't really match what other people are saying so
maybe the humidity is really that high that it makes it feel really hot around here and then
winter starts in September and goes all the way up to February and it has highs of 80s and lows
of the 60s sometimes it could even get up to the upper 50s but overall it's really good temperature
what you're eating there pineapple's good coming down to the subject of food
i love the pineapple well sorry got me in a bedpan
we love food in a tropical area because there's always an abundance of fruits and veggies
and we just love that we're having like the juiciest sweetest pineapple right now
which we wouldn't be able to get back in chicago in the middle of December
there's just so many fruit options and it's just so widely available it makes it so much
easier to eat healthy and delicious same thing goes with seafood uh there's seafood year round
there are certain seasons for certain seafood uh oysters go from the months of the hours November
October September i don't know why i went backwards but yeah you get the point there's
also octopus season and different fish season uh i think we're in marlin season right now so it's
nice to have a bunch of different seafood options and what makes puerto vallarta special for me is
that it's not necessarily super sound and it's not north so it's actually right in the middle
of mexico so you could out what's cool about that is that you can get good meat and you can
get good seafood in an area where you don't have to sacrifice one or the other one or the other and
that's what's really nice about puerto vallarta because we've had some really good steaks and
really good seafood so overall i would say this is a really good location for food just in general so
while we were in puerto vallarta we lived in three different locations we lived in el centro
which is very close to malecon then we moved to cinco de siemen and we rented that only because
it was my birthday and we celebrated it there with a really nice airbnb if you haven't seen
our video on my birthday check it out check it out gorgeous view shares three bucket list
things to do anyway but then we moved out to a neighborhood further north which is called
i always get that wrong it's a nice small neighborhood very local and even here in this
small neighborhood walking around we got i got to see a bunch of different restaurant options i just
seen sushi right now there's uh seafood meats a little bit of everything what is that good
brewery yeah and it's it's a local neighborhood so they even offer all those kinds of varieties
in a small neighborhood not just in the tourist environments so that's a huge plus so number five
in terms of health and fitness having access to good quality health care is important
both of us got chronic issues that are no fun so we've been to some doctors here and there
um and we paid a variety of different prices you can go to any of the consumptions at some
of the pharmacies and pay like 45-50 pesos for example but we also went to see a specialist
who had his own private practice and paid about a thousand pesos for his consult but it was a very
very thorough pencils and one of the best doctors we've seen for what we needed so the healthcare
expenses are really going to vary here depending on your needs but the good thing is that it's very
good quality i also saw a dentist who helped me refill some cavities she was great great work very
reasonable price in terms of uh being active or you live in a very cool terrain so you can go up
hiking you can go check out waterfalls oh you can run along you ride bikes you've seen bike groups
competitive soccer a little bit of everything so that's that's really nice and number six
the most important one not really the most important one but it's very important to us
dancing we while we haven't been out and dancing as much as we would like we haven't been feeling
our best there is the presence of a dance scene so that's good we like to see that there's lavo deita
del melio and in the center in the malacon that has live salsa every day except for mondays so
that's really cool we met we met some people who are social dancers in the area and told us about
other socials that are more for like social dancers and people who like to announce like
our sport almost we i found a little interesting that puerto vallarta is very close to nayarit the
neighboring state and there's other cities like untamita san pancho uh so certain nights people
drive from Puerto Callarta to Sayulita which is about 45 minutes to go out dancing i found that
interesting uh to me that kind of means it's a very very small dancing community but it's there
ooh and if you bump into some latino the group that played for kevin's birthday they're awesome
and they usually play along with malecon and you can totally just start dancing a little money
all right so to conclude would you live here uh yeah i definitely would but i i would want
to come back for the hottest times of the year because you need to see a city when it's hot in
cuba the way that they say and the whole garbage thing is a turn off for me a big turn off because
if it's hot and humid and the garbage is out like that the city's gonna smell pretty rough but
that's just an idea that i have i don't know if it's true but i will definitely try to live here
i like how quickly we jumped into a routine it was very we felt very comfortable here really quickly
it's a really nice balance like yes tourism is very strongly present but i like the balance of
locals um and tourism so in the area that we are right now more heavily locals the tourism is good
too because tourism allows you an opportunity for for business and to find ways to make money
where tourism is around so that's a big plus economic opportunities a lot of snow breaks just
much for watching take care take a shower
I don't see anything it doesn't work that way no it doesn't work thank you so much for watching
CIAO