Travel for Love

It’s been a very busy month around here, and I have not had any time to sit down and write anything coherent and thoughtful worthy of a blog post. I do have some time to provide a little update and assure everyone I am still alive and blogging.

So here’s an update on the things that have been keeping my busy lately.

1. We finally got out K-1 visa appointment! It seems to have taken the Rio consulate forever to get around to penciling us in, but we will have our appointment October 5. Roberto and I have been super busy getting everything together for the interview and trying to work out travel arrangements (yes, I will be attending).

It also means this is crunch time for me. This is the time I must gather all the evidence and proof to support our request for a favorable discretionary decision. I won’t go in to too many details but let’s just say I’ve made more candid (embarrassing?) requests from people, faxed more documents, wrote more letters and dug up more records in the past two weeks than probably my whole life combined. It’s a little bit like finals week in college when I was taking 18 credits of 400 level engineering classes, but without the structure or guidance.

But I’m working on it. Sadly this is all about me and Roberto can’t really help, but he is doing his share in preparing for the interview and picking up most of the travel arrangements and logistics once we are in Rio. There are just a million little things to do!

Feel free to contact me for more information on that front. We have become quite the experts in immigration.

2. Sometime last week I finally started to feel like myself again after coming down with one of the worst illnesses I think I’ve ever had in my life! I was out of commission for almost a week (even missing several days of work – very unlike me!) with some sort of virus. I am suspicious that it was Dengue fever, due to the mosquito bites I let myself get in Punta Cana last month, as well as strange symptoms ranging from a crazy rash all over my body to unexplainable pain behind my eyes. My bloodwork most notably revealed a very low white blood count which thankfully seems to have corrected itself recently. Since the doctor did not do a blood test for the specific virus, I am without a diagnosis but have my suspicion it was Dengue.

After several weeks of feeling weak and lightheaded and just plain blah I began feeling better in early August, only to experience a week of daily headaches topped off by a somewhat severe migraine aura that knocked me on my ass again. Happily I am feeling much better now and focusing on de-stressing (ha!), my yoga practice, and trying to eat better. I even began a vitamin program.

Unfortunately blog posts fell off the priority list during this time, although I have tons of stuff I want to write about.

3. In more positive news… I found a roommate! It’s been stressful for me to be living alone in my house this past year for a number of reasons. One is financial – it makes NO sense for me to be living alone when I have three spare bedrooms and plenty of room, and paying the mortgage and utilities gets expensive. Plus, it will be nice to have someone around when I travel since I worry about leaving my house empty and always need to make arrangements for my cats. Finally, it gets old being by yourself all the time and lonely coming home to an empty house every day.

So my new roommate is moving in this weekend (and yes, I’ve been busy preparing for that). She is a nice girl right about my age who works in the same area I do and seems to have a complimentary situation to mine. One of the problems I’ve had in the roommate search is my neighborhood is not convenient for most young people unless you happen to work in the area. I don’t live in a trendy area or close to a college, and most of my friends are either single and living in the city or married and living with their husbands. So far it seems like this roommate situation will work out well, and while we are both independent I definitely think we could become close pals and hang out together sometimes.

So that’s a little update on my life these days. Things will calm down after the interview if all goes well. We can start to expect an answer within about 6 months after that. We are going to be working out how we are going to get through this home stretch in the near future and hopefully making some plans, so stay tuned!

I read about the “7 Links Challenge” on ThePlanetD, a great travel blog by a super adventurous Canadian couple. Definitely go check out their blog if you haven’t already – they are an inspiration!

They got the idea from Problogger to do the 7 Links Challenge and inspire other travel bloggers to do the same. I thought it would be fun too participate too!

Here are the posts you are supposed to link:

Your first post
A post you enjoyed writing the most
A post which had a great discussion
A post on someone else’s blog that you wish you’d written
Your most helpful post
A post with a title that you are proud of
A post that you wish more people had read

My first post
Why Travel
This was an introspective piece where I tried to pinpoint why exactly I love to travel so much. Looking back I’m happy to note that my points are still valid and I still feel the same way.

A post I enjoyed writing the most
Traveling with a Brazilian
Oh boy was this one tough to pick! I love writing all my posts and especially enjoy all the fond memories they conjure. But my Traveling with a Brazilian post was just too fun to write. I love traveling with Roberto and I got the warm fuzzies thinking about all the reasons that make him a great travel companion!

A Post which had Great Discussion
On my List – The Balkans
Honestly I haven’t written any posts that roused a ton of controversy or passionate comments. This post got a few comments, but I am including it here because it continues to be one of my most popular posts and has brought lots of traffic to my site.

I post I wish I’d written
What is Microfinance: A Traveler’s View from the Field
Oh boy was this a tough one! There are TONS of amazing blogs out there with hundreds of posts I wish I’d written. I chose this post about microfinance on Uncornered Market because of how eye opening and educational (as always with UMarket!) the post was. I truly admire the way Daniel and Audrey travel and learn and grow, and how they can present such an educated and fresh perspective on nearly everything they encounter. This post made me realize how little I know about developing economies and isolated societies, and how we could possibly make a difference. I wish I had written such an educational post.

My most helpful post
On my List: Chernobyl
And I was just wishing I had written more educational posts. I also just started working on a (timely) post about staying healthy while traveling, but I don’t usually go around dishing out the travel advice on my blog. I went with this post about touring Chernobyl because I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that people never knew such a tour existed. And, let’s face it, it would be a pretty friggin cool tour!

A title I’m proud of
How I Became a Soccer Fan
Bah! I am not creative at ALL when it comes to titling my posts. I thought my “How I became a Soccer Fan” title was kind of fun, maybe a little interesting? I really need to get more creative with my titles…

A post I wish more people would read
Road Trip
All of them? Haha! Here’s an early one about a road trip through the Brazilian interior that I think people would find fun to read. It was an interesting trip!

So those are my 7 links! I hope you enjoyed!

So today I remembered I have a blog. Just kidding, although it probably seems that way after over 3 weeks with no posts. Of course I was in Spain for a good chunk of that time… And although I had the best intentions to post during that time and schedule content (I even have a few drafts started) it just didn’t happen. Once I got back, I got hit with a ridiculous allergy attack due to every tree in Pittsburgh blooming at the same time. Between not feeling well for my whole week back and catching up at work and at home, I haven’t had a spare minute to sit down and write any coherent content. Next week should be better and I have some great stuff to post from our recent trip.

I’ll give a little update on a few things.

Roberto and I had a great time in Spain. We enjoyed poking around Andalusia almost as much as we enjoyed spending time together again. We drank entirely too much sangria and spent entirely too much money. I can’t wait to share more of our experiences in Spain in posts to come.

I’ve also been thinking of some things I want to get accomplished with this blog. I am going to set up a Facebook fan page so my friends who want to keep up with my blog but don’t do the rss reader thing can follow it there. I just hope I get some fans!

Although it really isn’t on the site anywhere, I consider my blog’s tagline to be “travel and life of a Brazilian and American couple.” I’m starting to realize I tend to blog much more about the travel part than the life part. I think there are a few reasons for this: I’m not one to talk much about my personal life, and I don’t really have much exciting going on right now. I also have to be selective because people like close relatives and co-workers read my blog as well as internet strangers. However I think writing more about my life would be good for me, and it might make my blog a little more meaningful to readers.

There are a couple of “life” topics I’ve think I’d like to write about more, our long distance relationship and how we make it work, and our plans for the future. The future is a little more difficult to write about at the moment because it’s rather uncertain. I’ve been (rightfully) hesitant to discuss potential opportunities for us to be together during this immigration process because many have come and gone, to our unending frustration. We do still have something in the “crosshairs” and as soon as we are able to make some concrete plans I will blog about them for sure!

Oh and I don’t have the stomach to post in depth about the immigration process itself. It’s furious gathering of forms, documentation, and evidence followed by months on end of waiting. Repeated several times. There are plenty of resources on the internet for guidance on importing your significant other – we don’t need my perspective too.

Other things I’d like to write about more: Brazil (Roberto and I have some ideas), my hometown of Pittsburgh, personal finance, my work and the nuclear industry.

As if it isn’t apparent… I finally got around to using a prettier Wordpress theme and trying to customize it a little. I’ve been anxious to get onto something that has a white background and a wider text column. Hopefully you’ll find the new look to be more user friendly!

This blog is finally turning up in Google searches! At first, I couldn’t figure out what was stopping my site from being indexed. I had tried many things, including manually submitting it, with no results even after a month. Once I tried searching for “wordpress blog not indexed by Google,” I realized the problem: Wordpress has a default privacy setting that does not allow search engine traffic. So, I changed the setting a few days ago. Interestingly enough, I did not turn up any search engine results until after I linked my blog in Twitter. I definitely need to utilize Twitter alot more!

As a new blogger, I’ve been kind of learning as I go. I know there are lots of things I could do better, and there are plenty of things with the site I am not happy with. I really need to get a different domain just for the blog. I want to use a different Wordpress theme, but I have not been able to figure out how to customize the header the way I want it in anything but Kubrick. I also can’t stand how narrow the text column is and I would prefer the background to be white. These things aren’t customizable in Kubrick (as far as I can tell, anyway).

I set up the basics when I started blogging to be “acceptable” but not perfect cause I was afraid to spend too much time behind the scenes and not enough actually blogging. I knew I would need to at least have some content build up and have a reader or two for motivation to keep going. I wanted to work towards this as soon as possible. And I am still in this phase – I am trying to find the balance of writing posts and and working on the site.

By the way, my new twitter account is:

http://twitter.com/travelforlove