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!

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.

Warning – boyfriend gushing below!

Roberto and I have taken lots of trips together over the past 2 years. We traveled all over the US when he was still here, traveled around Brazil a lot, and visited Europe, the Caribbean, Hawaii, and Argentina. We have settled in to a nice comfortable travel style where we compliment each other’s strengths and weaknesses: he drives and I navigate (ALWAYS!), he carries the heavy stuff and I hold onto the important stuff (netbook, ipods, passports, reservations), and when we buy drinks we put them in each other’s backpack pockets for easy access. We make most decisions together and we both have a go-with-the-flow attitude when visiting places, often making spur of the moment decisions.

While I am grateful for such a good travel companion in general, I also get to enjoy some benefits and unique aspects of traveling with a Brazilian. These things would likely not be the case if I were traveling with another American.

Note that while many of these topics are characteristic of Brazilian culture I’m not trying to generalize or stereotype – really I’m just talking about traveling with MY Brazilian, and can’t speak for the rest of them!

The Language Thing

Of course, I rely on Roberto like crazy when I travel to Brazil. Sadly, I am not coming along as far as I’d like with learning Portuguese partly because he’s just so darn good at translating everything for me. I would truly be lost traveling in Brazil without his help!

But he’s even super useful outside Brazil! His Spanish is also very good, so I can thoroughly depend on him in Spanish-speaking countries too. This really helps when we run into people who don’t speak any English, or quickly exhaust somebody’s English phrases. This has the added benefit that Roberto can have more in depth conversations with locals, get better travel advice, and really just warm people up by speaking their native language.

I usually sit back and listen during these conversations, understanding maybe half of what’s being said in Spanish and not much more in Portuguese.

Of course, being fluent in a couple romance languages doesn’t help much outside Europe and the Americas. We’ll both be equally lost when we travel to other places like Africa and Asia.

Conversing with the locals…

Brazilians are Everywhere!

We’ve run into Brazilians in the most random of places. There was that family from Sao Paulo we met on an airboat in the Everglades, the group of Capoeira dancers in front of Sacre-Coeur in Paris, and the group of Brazilian women sitting behind us on the motorboat in the Bruges canals.

This is fun because, they are always delighted to find other Brazilians and start sharing life stories. Usually they’ll talk to us both in Portuguese and I’ll follow along as best I can nodding and smiling until Roberto gets around to telling them I’m American. Then typically one of them will address me in English and tell me about their sister/uncle/friend/primo who lives in Miami/NYC/Boston.

It’s nice to feel a sense of community among Brazilians who meet out in the world. It’s a bit different from meeting Americans because I don’t think we have the same kind of pride in our culture as Brazilians do. Not to say we aren’t patriotic – it’s just different with American cultural influence being so far reaching. Brazilians don’t have a familiar churrascaria in every major city the way we have McDonald’s, so they seem to find much more joy out of meeting people from back home.

The Common Thread – Soccer

Since the rest of the world loves soccer for reasons us Americans can’t seem to understand, traveling with a bona fide member of the soccer-loving community has its perks. For every region we’ve traveled to, Roberto seems to know enough soccer facts to engage the locals in an in depth conversation about their popular teams’ rivalries and recent matches, best players and coaching woes, and that country’s performance in the most recent world cup and their predictions for 2010.

Bonding over a soccer match in the DR.

What this means to me? Well, Roberto’s bonding with folks over their passion for soccer is a great way to meet people and make friends. He’s broken the ice through soccer with just about every cab driver we’ve ever had, often then moving into some great tidbits on what to do in the area and what to avoid. We’ve had tons of fun getting to know waiters and bartenders through soccer which usually leads to free drinks and chef “experiments” not to mention great advice on local nightlife.

I think some of the waiters in the touristy areas enjoy us (Roberto) making an effort to get to know them, and talk about something meaningful to them rather than which tourist sites we should see next.

In General

In general we’ve found that foreigners (this was true in the US too) are often super intrigued by Brazilian culture and want to learn more. They have ideas of a beautiful and exotic land with gorgeous people and a fun loving culture (well that sounds about right!). Brazil isn’t often in the forefront of international news so these assumptions live on. This is an interesting contrast to American culture, which most other countries are exposed to plenty. There’s no mystery to being American.

It’s been a great experience for me to travel with Roberto and begin to understand global perceptions of Brazil, the US, and international relationships from various perspectives. I like to think of it as an unexpected perk of having a multicultural relationship!