Destination Paradise

I have to admit that I prepared for this to be a difficult Christmas. Obviously after spending 4 Christmases apart from Carlos, I had to be excited to finally spend our FIRST Christmas as a married couple and our first Christmas as a family of three. Obviously those things were a big deal but as Christmas approached, they kept getting overshadowed by sadness of all that we'd be missing. See, I am from a large, lively, mostly Italian-American family (mom's side), virtually all of which lives in Chicago, and except for one year with my Guatemalan family in New York, I have never in my 29 years spent a Christmas without them!! This means that Christmas has always involved multiple family events, piles of Italian beef, Italian sausage, mostaccioli, multiple pies, multiple Christmas trees, Christmas movies playing loudly on TVs all over the house, louder relatives having a good time, AND real cannoli to top it all off. Then let's add the fact that Carlos is from a Mexican ...

While being away from the rest of the family and the comforting traditions on Thanksgiving can be so depressing, there are some benefits. One big one is that we can be totally flexible with how we celebrate and what traditions we carry on/invent. So, our original Thanksgiving Day plan was to make our first trip to Costco for some essentials, and then cook dinner and have our own little Thanksgiving here in Korea. But the moment we set foot in Costco, we knew it was going to be no small trip. We ended up spending hours in there, and since Lucas was doing fine relaxing in the cart with an iPad, we decided to just skip the plans for dinner and instead do our Thanksgiving Dinner on Friday. Thus, our Thanksgiving meal was actually McDonald's, another rare delicacy from home.  This means we were able to stock up on so many awesome and exciting things: cheese, sausage, AVOCADOES!, oatmeal, plus our Thanksgiving dessert. Costco is fun because all of the expats wander the store with...

(A.K.A. the post where I will make heavy use of the past perfect tense) It's been a month already! Sadly, we still don't have internet at home, so this has limited my online posting, but soon (hopefully this week) that will be set up. Here are some of the things that have happened in our first month in Korea: We think we found a church. It was recommended by multiple friends. Not too far from home, but still takes about an hour to get there via subway. Hoping that we'll settle in and get connected there. By the way, churches are truly everywhere here. They almost all have a lit neon cross on top, so at night, when we look out our back window, we see lots of these dotting the streets between our apartment and the main boulevard. flickr photo courtesy of taylorsloan Carlos found a soccer team. He looked online, found a great team, and has been playing with them for a few weeks. It's an expat league, so most of the players are from the US, the UK, Spain, and Latin ...

Oops. It's been over a month since I was in Mexico and I still haven't posted most of the photos. I'll add them in a second. An update on immigration: our amazing attorney is now filing a separate appeal that will go to a completely different office. So she's basically working from two angles, and if either is successful, we're looking at a brand new chance! So we just need prayers that we'll get quick and favorable responses. Now, back to the trip. Aside from the absolute insanity of our experience with immigration, we had a good time together. Here are some highlights: Carlos bought me a slice of German Chocolate Cake for my birthday! Baby G and I both enjoyed it. We went to this huge market/strip mall, "Los Cabacitos". Several food vendors make stuff that's so good, this place is known all over the city. These gorditas are one example: picadillo con papas (ground beef with potatoes) is the top one, and calabacitas (squ...