Destination Paradise

(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 ...

The Guerra family has finally arrived. We have lost all sense of time, we are slightly dazed, confused, and barely have any Korean won in our possession at the moment, but we are together. To everyone who prayed at different stages of this journey, THANK YOU!  I believe it's only by the grace of God that we made it to this point. The trip Lucas and I did pretty well on our 14-hour direct flight from Chicago to Seoul. All I can say is Korean Air is fantastic. The food, the service, and the amenities were all top-notch for economy-class seats. On my personal media player, I managed to watch three movies (Thor, Fast Five, and most of Adjustment Bureau). This is also basically the number of non-children's releases I've seen since Lucas was born, so that was exciting. Lucas slept for most of the flight and I got some sleep as well. Lucas was awesome on the plane, played happily in his seat, ate his snacks in between meals, and made me proud. The harder part was after a...

We leave for Korea at midnight. I've carefully arranged mine and Lucas' lives into 2 large and 2 medium suitcases and that should last us the whole year. Now all we need is prayer. For those of you willing to stand in the gap for us, here are some of the biggest concerns: Health . Particularly Lucas who seems to have come down with a cold. Not fun for flying, so pray it goes away fast. Smooth travel. Especially for Carlos who has two connections and 30 hours total travel time on his journey from Mexico to Korea. Safety for our belongings . I know they're just earthly possessions and they don't matter, but life without our stuff would be so much more difficult. Carlos' airline in particular is notorious for losing luggage. Pray it all gets to Korea with us. Sanity . For all of us. Carlos has a nearly 10-hour layover after the first leg of his trip, in a tiny airport where there's hardly anything to do. I will be arriving to Seoul a full 7 hours ahead o...

We've been kinda cryptic about our upcoming plans, but now that everything's official, it's time to announce it clearly. Yes, we are moving to South Korea. I've been hired through the Korean government to teach English at a public middle school in Seongnam , which is a city of about 1 million people (9th largest in the republic), just a 45-minute trip from Seoul, roughly. Carlos will stay home with Lucas and teach him all the important stuff in life. We will be together. The position includes a furnished one-bedroom apartment (for those who have taught in Korea, you know that one bedroom is a big deal!), which is located about 5 minutes' walking distance from the school, and which has a park across the street. My contract starts September 1, but I'm pretty sure we'll be heading there a bit in advance, so we'll straighten out those details soon. I'm very excited about this position because when I interviewed with the school, they were especially...

I go 6 months without posting and now I do two posts in two days. This isn't likely to be a regular occurrence, but the holiday weekend gave me some time to ponder and write. This weekend the New York Daily News published an article about three wonderful bloggers I've come to know well through our shared struggle in balancing immigration and international relocation for the sake of a marriage: Emily Cruz ( The Real Housewife of Ciudad Juarez ), Giselle Stern Hernandez ( The Deportee's Wife ) and Cheryl Arredondo ( Us, After America ). The moment the article went online, the comments section predictably filled with the usual hate and ignorance that you see any time one of our stories is published. I became well-acquainted with this rhetoric one year ago when my family's story published in the Chicago Tribune. The best advice is to not even bother reading the comments section, and I normally follow that advice because truly, nothing healthy or productive can come of ...

Today is a day of conflict for many families like mine. On the one hand, we're surrounded by parades, festivals, flags and all the symbolism reminding us to be proud of and celebrate our great country. On the other hand, we're weary from the daily and very undignified struggle of having our nuclear family unit split up into different countries as a result of our our own country's policies and legal values. Our families are put through exceptionally miserable challenges due to unjust laws that were passed, after all, by legislative representatives of the American people. And more recently, various elected officials have started passing legislation that is not only questionable under the constitution, but thoroughly misguided and fundamentally based in racism and xenophobia. Finally, many news sources spread a huge amount of rhetoric that really does have its base in hate, ignorance, willful misinformation, and lies. This is the stuff that gets the most attention, becaus...

Maybe it's been a little too long since my last post, huh? I don't get how all those mommy bloggers do it. I can barely get a few ideas strung together before I'm asked to fix a broken helicopter, read a big trucks book, or replay some scenes from Toy Story or Curious George. For example, this post was actually written over a period of 7 different sessions. What have we been doing? There was a trip to Mexico in September shortly after my last post. Even though that was many months ago, it's probably a good starting place as I try to get back into the blogging game. I live for moments like these: Our visit coincided with Mexico's historic bicentennial independence celebration. Although hysteria over potential cartel violence managed to keep us from going to any public events, we did get to enjoy the festivities from home, and from various small-scale celebrations during the week. Everywhere we went, people were selling flags, horns, and other fe...