Directionally challenged? No, just culture shock.

Notice anything strange?

For those of you who know me, I am not (usually) directionally challenged, but for some reason since moving here to PA, I have been hopelessly confused between east and west.

I shouldn't be having this problem.  From a young age my mother instructed me on how to use a map. She was determined that my brother and I became sufficient map readers.   And somewhere along the line we became very good at not just directions, but also being able to orientate ourselves in new cities and places fairly quickly.

Skills that help me do this is really noticing the what is around me and looking for small landmarks that tell me where I am.  Using a GPS with the directionality feature confuses me because I like to think of places and directions in terms of fixed points instead of moving objects.  Fixed cardinal points help orientate me.

Even with all my training as a child at my mother's side and my usually keen sense of direction, when someone here tells me that a certain place is east or west of my current location I automatically think that it is actually the opposite direction.  It takes me looking at a map to figure out my mistake.  Of course, I am slowly getting to know different cities, and towns, and townships, whatever those are, but I still have a lot to learn.

I think the root of my problem is disorienting fact that here on the East Coast the sun sets over the land and not the water (no romantic beach sunsets!?) and, apart from living in Spain I have spent most of my life on the west coast of the Americas where west means towards the coast and east meant inland, away from the coast.  For some reason this has translated in to me associating "west" here to be towards the water.  Which is, obviously, east.  Confusion!!

I hope that with finally figuring out bit of confusion I will soon revert to back to what Pollo likes to refer to as his "human GPS".

This confusion has taught me that not all culture shocks come in the forms of new food and new people and new words.  There are lots of ways to experience culture shock and when you move your entire mindset has to adjust to your new surroundings including some basic concepts of direction and orientation.

From conditional to permanent, permanent resident!

Pollo has been in the USA from almost 2 years!  To celebrate this anniversary we get to reapply for his permanent residency.  Yay!  We actually just have to file to petition to remove the conditional status of his permanent residency, but it is similar to reapplying.

We had to fill out the form I751 which includes information about Pollo and then information on myself as well as we file together to remove the conditions of conditional status.

We had to provide documentation of our lasting marriage in the form of photos, mail delivered to the both of us, any joint account or joint assets together (like our new car), and our marriage certificates, and also affidavits from people who know us.  We skipped the last part though because we thought that owning car and appearing on a lease together would be sufficient.

One of the more complicated things that we had to do was get a translation of our Peruvian Marriage Certificate.  The USCIS website is unclear about the officialness that the translation has to be in.  We assumed that I couldn't do it since I have no official translating credential so I contacted some companies in the area to see what they could do.  I got one quote for $150 and one for $85, all for a one page document.  I tried using the American Translators Association, but a lot of the people on there don't actually have translation degrees or don't respond to their contact info.  After some dily-dallying, I remembered that my friend works for a translation company that I knew I could trust and she hooked us up with an official translation and the official certification.

Once we had our paperwork gathered and organized we put everything in an envelope with a a lot of money and sent it off.  It was rather anticlimactic, but also nerve wracking at the same time.  We have no idea when we will hear back from USCIS or what the next steps are.  It also took a lot less research than doing our original paperwork which you can read about in earlier editions of these posts.

I feel like the ease of this process is luring me into a false sense of security with the permanent residency.  Or maybe it IS this simple and I'm just worried from our past experience in Peru.  Whatever is is, I hope we get Pollo's permanent Green Card soon!

Buying a New Car

There they are!   A nice little Toyota family

We know that when Pollo took this job that he would be driving a lot for work and if we didn't get another car I would be stuck at home, or completely dependent on him taking me places and then picking me back up in the afternoon.  Not a lot of independence.  I looked at the bus option, and found that to get anywhere of importance you have to take the bus to the central station and then transfer from there.  (I will do this one day to see what is it like...) So, we decided to get a second car that would be good not only as a second set of wheels, but also as a safer set of wheels for the crazy East Coast weather.   Once we got more or less settled in our new place we put our heads together and started our research for getting a second car, which ended up being a NEW one.

Pollo and I are now the second people in on my side of the family to buy a new car. My brother and his wife bought a new car a few years ago, but our parents do not buy any new cars (or TVs, yet).  All the cars that I have had and that have been in the garage at home have been used.  Excellent used cars at that, but for our second car here in Pennsylvania we didn't find what we were looking for in a used car. We were looking for an AWD with low mileage, probably a CR-V or a Rav4 because of the space, the reliability, and the fact that it sits up higher than a sedan, but doesn't guzzle gas.  We found that right now, buying a used car with low mileage is either more than a new car or not significantly less so we decided to look at the new car options where you get all the original warranties and get pretty much exactly what you want and you don't have to worry about how the original owner kept the car.

For help with buying a new car I turned to the Motley Fool's Guide to Buying a New Car.  The article is really long and I'm not always a fan of their writing style, but their advice is good and gives you lots of good pointers and tricks for not being taken in by a dealership.   Another good resource for a car buying guide is with the Consumer Reports New Car Buying Guide or the Consumer Reports Car Buying Advice article. All of these articles are really long, but they go along with the most important advice which is to do your homework.  Cars are not really good investments as new cars depreciate in value as soon as they leave the lot and then lose the highest percentage of their value in their first three years in your home, but it is a a major investment which shouldn't be taken lightly.  So read the articles and do the research.

For car research I used Consumer Reports to check out how the 2014 models were ranked and rated against previous models and to find out minor flaws and improvements to each new model.  Consumer Reports works best for checking out reliability and safety and handling of each car, but their rankings and reviews are limited to paying subscribers.   If you want to break things down even more and compare the specs of different cars and a lot of little details like width of the car and how much mileage it is supposed to give you then the best website I found was to use Edmonds.com car comparison page. When you plug in the make and model of the car it gives you somewhere around 4 pages of comparisons which were really helpful for us because we were basically comparing the same car from different companies.  It even gives you an idea of what consumers think of each car.  This helped organize the car information that I was collecting along the way.  Edmonds also has articles and other pieces of helpful information that I didn't look at.

Once we completed our research we got to contacting dealerships about our interest.  Here comes Consumer Reports again, but they have this thing where you can say what you are interested in buying and the dealers will call you to get the ball rolling.  This is handy because you get a direct contact of a person you can talk to, but it means that you might get more contacts than you really need.  Another way to start the ball rolling is to use the Costco Auto Program, which you also need to be a Costco Member to take advantage of, but Costco is pretty amazing in general so I would suggest a membership even if you don't want to buy a car.  We found that going through the Costco Auto Program actually gave us the best price out there.  We were told that Costco really wants to make sure that their members get the best price on the market so you can actually push them lower than you can another dealer. We were offered a price that was significantly lower than any other dealership was willing even willing to entertain.   We closed with a good deal, but then had to deal with talking to the financing guy who also tries to sell you other things for your car.  Like extended warranty and fancy protections and stuff.  we added a few extras that we deemed worthy, but didn't add too many things.

Another aspect of getting a new car that I never thought about is the ability to choose what color your car is.  When you get used you don't really care about the color, but more about how the car runs.   With our new Rav4 we chose the outside color and the inside color and then they had to go out and get it for us!  It was pretty cool.  Once we finished our paperwork (and we got Pennsylvania licenses) our car arrived the very next week and I went to go pick it up!  Pollo was on a business trip so the dealership picked me up and  I drove it home all by myself without anything happening to it, or me.  It was a lot of work trying to figure out the car thing, but I'm glad we were thorough.

In the month of dealing with cars, buying the car was actually the least frustrating event...more on our other car adventures next post.

A Strawberry Festival

Some of the beautiful tulips.

Strawberries!!!!  A couple of weekends ago Pollo and I took a short trip over to the Peddler's Village located in Lahaska/New Hope, PA. (Or somewhere close to that), to check out a Strawberry Festival.  I was a little confused because it seemed awfully early in the season to have strawberries on the East Coast, but since here was an event with both fruit AND a festival/cute place to see I decided to just roll with it and we went to check it out.The festival is held in early May each year at the very quaint and slightly touristy Peddlers Village about an hour north from where we live.  The website boasts strawberry themed stalls, baked goods, a pie eating contest and an area for vendors.

When I was researching this place I couldn't figure out if it was an enclosed space, or a real place, or some sort of Epcot Center-esque area.  It ended up being all of that all rolled into one, but cute and fun to wander around. There are several restaurants, a historic looking inn, and lots of shops that sell items from homemade candy to antiques and furnishing for your man cave(the shop really did advertise furnishings for a man cave...).  All around the businesses are gardens that were loaded with spectacularly colored tulips.  I'm glad we got to see the tulips in PA, because I seem to have missed them in CA.

We started our explorations by hitting up the artisan vendor corner and had a nice chat with the owner of Razz's Shagbark Hickory Syrup.   Hickory syrup is what you get from boiling down hickory bark and sugar to make into a syrup.  We bought a bottle of the syrup that has a rich nutty/smokey flavor that should go great with pancakes or glazed onto a meat dish.  We admired the tulips and poked into almost all of the cute little shops that they have in the village.  Our favorite and most unique was the Knobs and Knockers store that has little gadgets, cute gift items and lots and lots of knobs and knockers for whatever door you might want to have a knob of knocker.

And the strawberries?  Sadly limited to items from one bakery and strawberry lemonade stands that nobody was approaching because of the bone chilling mist that over took everything for half of the day. Oh!  And a strawberry beer that I had (me!  ordering a beer! ) at lunch time.

Tadaa! I drank some beer!  and it tasted nothing like strawberries. :(

I believe they had a stand selling strawberries, but I saw a guy go past with a flat of strawberries in Driscoll clamshells...from California.  We did enjoy our mini strawberry pie and strawberry pull apart bread and oogled the rest of the bakery case, but thats are far as they strawberries went.

All some type of strawberry baked good.

By the end of the day the sun poked its head out and there was much more spirit of festivities with live music from the community playing and people finally being able to purchase frozen lemonade treats.  Although the Strawberry Festival seems like a front to get people (like us...) to go to the Peddlers Village, we were glad we went to explore and we had a very tasty lunch at the Buttonwood Grill that we would gladly repeat, especially with visitors (hint hint).

Yay!  Sun!

They also sold a lot of pretzels...why are pretzels a thing here??

House Hunting - PA

Otherwise known as the moving saga part 2.

Before we left the Bay Area, I joked with people that Pollo and I would film our own version of the tv show "House Hunters"to show everyone what our crazy house hunt was like.  We always laughed at how the couples always wanted different things and went on a whirlwind house hunting spree.  Little did we know we were in for our own whirlwind house hunt, at least we had talked before we spoke with any leasing agents so we knew what we wanted more or less.

When we went down to Maryland to spend the weekend at Pollo's aunt and uncles we spent an obscene amount of time searching for places to live.  Before arriving in Pennsylvania we thought that we could live in Lancaster, Pa because that would give Pollo access to the company distribution center in Harrisburg and it seemed more centrally located so that he could make his various retailer visits all across the state.  However, on our first drive through of the area and when we really sat down to look at where the retailers were located, Lancaster was too far out of the way to live.

We learned that the previous manager lived in King of Prussia (which is closer to Philadelphia) because it gave him access to a lot of freeways and was pretty close to Philadelphia and a lot of the top level retailers are located close to Philadelphia.  So, we turned our sights from Amish country to suburban Philadelphia.  Pollo was starting work in earnest the second week we arrived in PA so we had one week to find a place and move in!  Yes, we could have spent longer looking for places, but with Pollo working it would limit us to weekend searching and every day we spent not in a permanent place to live would mean we had to pay for temp housing ($$$).

Monday was not as productive as we thought because we spent a lot of time calling people and setting up appointments. When calling for an appointment I learned to first ask if they had immediate (like end of the week) availability and that got rid of about a quarter of the places we had picked out.

One thing that was frustrating was that every single place was a community.  By searching online there were less than 2 places that were rented out individually.  No one was renting houses or personally owned apartments.  Even driving through small town(ships?) we never saw signs for rentals.  Maybe if we had found the local newspaper we could have found more, but even the front desk guy at the (pretty great) Best Western in King of Prussia didn't have great ideas except for online and a pamphlet of rental communities.

We also learned to judge a place by its cover.  It it had a cheezy/horribly outdated website, chances were high that the place would also be a little funky and outdated.  Along those same lines, the places that had awesome websites and lots of amenities were waay out of our price range.  One of the communities had tanning beds in its gym!  Some of the places offered lots of amenities included and some had none.  Some of the places also use variable pricing which they explained to us was like airline pricing.  The price of a certain type of apartment was dependent on how many of them were available on the day you move in.  The price that the company quotes you is good for a maximum of 48 hours and can vary by up to $100.  It really pushes the renter to make a decision quickly.

Our second day was much more productive and we spent from 8:30-6:00 on the hunt and by the time we went to sleep we had narrowed it down to two different places.

We were between a really awesome place with an open plan kitchen and really nice amenities that was a little further out of the way and a larger place that also had nice amenities, but was on the edge of an area that everyone we had talked to warned us away from.  We looked up renter's reviews on the Apartment Ratings Website and found out that place A was dangerously close to a university and that all the university kids live there.  This means lots of late night parties and no parking after 5pm.  While we don't consider ourselves old fogies, living in a place with loud parties is not really our scene.  For place B, we didn't find any horrible reviews and using Neighborhood Scout  we figured out that it was in the best area of the bad neighborhood.  We figured it was like Oakland, or really any city, with good and bad parts and we'd take the chance and go with place B.  It also gave us more space (2bd, 2 bath, and a dining room!), a gas stove, lots of parking and put us closer to major freeways.

On Wednesday morning we returned to our chosen apartment community and put in our application before returning to Maryland to relax and collect all our things.  Our application was approved and we moved in on Saturday!  We officially completed a cross country move in a week.  Go Team!
Here are some pictures of our new place!  We were so relieved to find a place to call our very own.

our key!

A brook on the property!

And a gym

Pollo's work space

The kitchen

View from the dining room into the living room

Dining rooms space

Living room sans couch

Master Bath

our self rigged Ikea shelf and towel rack

The Moving Saga - Part 1

We're finally settling into our life here in Pennsylvania and I have time to do some updates on what we have been doing.  Let's start with the moving process and adventures that ensued.

This will be the first update in the moving saga of Pollito and Reina.  I'm not sure how many installments there will be, but it is always good to start at the beginning.

First of all, you never know how much stuff you have until you try to move.  I had experienced this phenomenon before when I moved around in Spain and also when I left Peru, but I had never really tried moving out of my childhood/entire life up to now home.  For someone who likes to keep physical copies of memories like artwork, small gifts, photos, trinkets, etc. the moving experience can be somewhat scaring.  It took a while to figure out what to do with all the things that I have.  I had donation piles, recycle piles, bags of trash, piles of items to be packed for the airplane, items to be packed into boxes, and items to be left at home.  All of these piles had constantly changing contents as I tried to figure out what went where and as I remembered the memories attached to each piece.  Once I finished with everything in my room, I had to move on to items that had been stored away in the garage and spare bedroom for when I finally moved out.

Pollo on the other hand had to figure out which half of his possessions to take on the airplane with him and what to leave in boxes to ship later.  The end.  Not fair.

Pollo's company gave us relocation money and we originally thought to pack and ship our items and our 2 pieces of furniture, but we found that moving companies give you a certain amount of space for a certain amount of money, and there was no way we were going to use all of it so it would be akin to wasting free money.  Through a clever scheme of Pollo's we got Macy's to ship all of our wedding gifts to our new future house and we found that using a shipping service like Fedex or UPS would be a lot cheaper to ship the rest of our items.  We also took advantage of Southwest's two free checked bag policy to take everything that we would need immediately.  With the money we saved from these tactics we would be able to buy new furniture so we didn't have to worry about our two little pieces from Oakland.

Although we didn't ship household goods, we did end up shipping our car across the country because we didn't have the time or the desire to drive it across at the end of the particularly horrendous winter that had swept the eastern side of the US.  We followed a friend's advice and used United Van Lines to ship the car.   Pollo also learned that you should check out a moving company on the Department of Transportation's website on moving companies.  With their Department of Transportation number or their name you can check various safety statistics before you ship off all your worldly possessions in a random van with a random driver.  The Department of Transportation also has a website devoted to moving, which is currently not accessible.  We were very happy with the car moving company and their responsiveness.  We shipped out our car two weeks before we needed it and hoped that it would arrive neither too early nor too late.

After spending a week in Denver for Training Pollo and took a late night flight to Philadelphia and United Van Lines delivered our car right to our hotel the very next morning.  Perfect timing!  We packed it to the gills before heading off on an exploratory trip through Philadelphia, on to Pennsylvania Dutch country and then down to Maryland to visit Carlos's aunt and uncle.

Our little California car all ready to take on the East Coast

In our first day on the East Coast we learned the people in Pennsylvania are horrible drivers, Lancaster (Pennsylvania Dutch Country) is too far away to live for Pollo's work, and tolls are a big pain in the behind.  If you plan on driving around the East Coast, make sure you have lots of cash on you to pay the never ending tolls and take a crash course in Peruvian driving skills to come away unscathed.  We spent our first weekend with family in Maryland relaxing and gearing up for a whirlwind house hunting tour the following week.

The Return of Pollito and Reina

Pollito and Reina are back online to recount new adventures!

It has been quite a while since the last posting...about 2 years perhaps?  I stopped blogging because our adventures in the US didn't seem quite so exciting as the adventures we had abroad, but maybe I just got lazy.

Since Pollito arrived in the US, life has been a long roller coaster of emotions and events that has finally led us to where we are now : Pennsylvania.

To recap ever so quickly:
-Everyone is excited and anxious and Pollo arrived in the US at the end of Sept. 2012.
-We were shocked when his Green Card arrived in October.  We thanked our lucky stars we filed for the visa the way we did.
-We were hopeful that a program called Upwardly Global would help him a little more with getting his foot in the door job wise and although he learned some things about jobs in the US, nothing from the program really panned out.
-After some stress and lots of planning, we had our church wedding and reception on our first anniversary in Oakland surrounded by friends and family from all over.
-Pollo took lots of English classes with Berlitz Languages that helped him with confidence and greatly improved his English.
-Over the course of 18 months, Pollo applied to dozens of jobs and made it to the last round of three different interviews, but to no avail.  It was frustrating trying to figure out what was keeping him from getting an offer.
-Finally, after a trip to Peru in February of 2014, Pollo went through one final job interview process...AND GOT THE JOB!  The position is an Account Manager Position with a major telecom company.  The only downside is that the job is in Pennsylvania far away from the warm California sun and all the friends and family on the Best (sorry, west) Coast.
-Almost two years to the day that I moved back to the US, we took a leap of faith and moved cross country to the East Coast.

Our next adventures will chronicle our sudden move across country, the assumption of many truly adult responsibilities, and our East Coast endeavors.