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!