Apartment hunting online...

Since our current "home base" is in Nebraska and we are all in Finland right now, we have been hunting for an apartment in Maryland online. Not an easy task I can tell you.

 

Not being able to visit the place you plan on calling home for at least a year or so (12 month leases are rather common) makes it a bit tough to make a decision. We found several potential places, but upon closer inspection they turned out to be not what we need or want. We first found a place with an excellent location (8 minute drive to husband's office!) and with good ratings from apartmentratings.com. Our wonderful friends (thank you so much! :) went to take a look at it and took photos and everything looked great. That is, until I probed the elementary school a bit better. While the school had gotten a decent grade (6) at Greatschools, the reviews were not good, not good at all. So we had to pass on that apartment.

 

Next we found one that was a bit further away (25 minute drive) from husband's office. The elementary school was great and the place had gotten great ratings. So we contacted them and got a nice quote from the manager. We thought about it overnight and decided to go with the place, since we were running out of time. We contacted the place again and the lady we spoke the day before was not there. The new manager told us the prices change every day and today the price had gone up $200 a month. The rents in Maryland already seemed outragious to us, so adding another $200 to our monthly expenses didn't seem like a smart thing to do. So we had to look elsewhere. We first looked at the same town, but couldn't find a good place to live in. The places were either too pricey or apartment ratings mentioned roaches and other bug issues. Some places looked great until I checked the crime stats...armed robberies, narcotics offenses and assaults right around the corner. No thank you.

 

Next we looked at a place that is a 35 minute drive away from husband's office. Again the schools looked great and the apartment complex had gotten good reviews. Crime stats showed only traffic offenses. Unfortunately they didn't have any vacancies fitting our minimum requirements (2bed, 2bath) and if we wanted to live there we'd have to settle for a 2bed 1bath place. We really didn't want to give up on the second bathroom, since we are already downsizing from living in a house to living in an apartment. Luckily the lady told us that they had another property in the same town and they had one 2bed 2bath available later this month. So we decided to go with that, since we were running out of time and options fitting in our price range. We paid the application fees and were approved. Now we have to sign the lease and have our signatures notarized and mail a check for the deposit.

 

This is what our floor plan will look like:

 

We are basically leasing the place blind, but husband did found out from their website that we have 30 days from the moving date to cancel our lease. Let's hope we got lucky and won't have to look any further!

 

Random Tuesdays 11/11/2014

 

Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain in 2014

 

English or Finglish?

Now that we are moving back to the U.S I've been seriously thinking about changing the language of this blog. All my academic work is in English and the only time I'll be using Finnish in Maryland might be when I'm talking with our lil man.

 

The problem is that my Finnish is pretty horrible, my Mom has to correct me all the time. People at work have already gotten used to my weird Finnish, so maybe those reading this blog would too? I think most of you, who read my blog, understand Finnish, am I right? I know my husband prefers my blog in English, but he would just have to learn Finnish ;) 

 

Honestly, this blog would probably be more in Finglish than Finnish, would that bother anyone? My laptop is American, but I have a Finnish keyboard which sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. So I might be missing Scandinavian letters a lot.

 

 

 

I would really like practice writing in Finnish and this blog would be the perfect way to do it.

What do you guys think; English or Finglish? :)

 

 

The Old Line State

It appears our next home state will be...Maryland!

Husband interviewed for two jobs and received offers from both. In the end we picked the Maryland job for financial reasons; better pay and better benefits.

 

source: wikipedia.org

 

 

We are now in Finland getting everything ready for the move. Husband will leave in a couple of weeks and lil man and I will follow a month or so later.

 

source: wikipedia.org

 

Neither of us really know Maryland that well. Husband has only been there for his job interview and I've gone through the state twice on a Greyhound bus, without getting out of the bus :) We are very much looking forward to exploring the state once we get there!

 

So the next few weeks will be super busy since we have to pack up the house, sell/give away the extra stuff and say au revoir to all our Finnish friends and loved ones :( I plan on already booking our flights back to Finland for the summer, so it won't be that long until I see everyone again.

 

I will try to document our move from time to time on this blog, but we don't have an internet connection at our house anymore, so posting might be a bit sporadic.

 

Hope everyone is having a wonderful week! :)

 

Random Tuesdays 10/28/2014

Madrid, Spain in 2014

 

Due to changing continents etc., Random Tuesdays might be published rather sporadically until we have sorted out the living situation. My apologies :)

 

Random Tuesdays 10/21/2014

Christ Church Cathedral in Montreal, 2007

Random Tuesdays 10/14/2014

Greyhound window photography in Jacksonville, Florida in 2007

Becoming an Alien Spouse, IR-1, step #5 - POE at FLL

Five days after the interview, I picked up my passport with the visa sticker and my immigration package from the consulate in Helsinki. The immigration package was a rather heavy A4 sized envelope sealed by the consulate. With the package came instructions on how to pay the ELIS fee of $165. The USCIS Electronic Immigration System fee "covers the cost of USCIS processing, filing and maintaining immigrant visa packets, plus the cost of producing Permanent Resident Cards." The fee can be paid before or after you enter the United States, but the actual resident card (aka "Green Card") won't be produced until after the fee is paid. I paid the fee right away with my Finnish credit card through the online portal, which can be found here.

Photo source

I entered the United States through the Ft. Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport and have only good things to say about my experience. Ft Lauderdale is a small-ish airport, which is currently under construction. It is mainly used by people who fly to Ft. Lauderdale to take Caribbean cruises. Judging by the "Arrivals" screen, most international flights arrived from the Caribbean countries. Also Norwegian flies there, hence there were a lot of Scandinavian tourists at the airport.

Once we arrived to the immigration part of the airport, we went to the "Visitors" line. The line was short compared to my previous experiences at JFK, Newark and Chicago O'Hare. It took us about 10 minutes to get to the first immigration officer. I handed him my passport and immigration package and he said "whoa, what do we have here" :D After that he scanned my finger prints and took my photo. He explained the immigration process to my husband (didn't talk to me at all, maybe he wasn't sure if I spoke English? :) and said we would now be taken to the back room for further processing. He said it was first come, first serve, so it might take a while. Once we got there, there were only four other people in the room, so I figured it wouldn't take long. We barely had time to sit down when I was called to the counter. A very friendly immigration officer asked me to sign a paper and took my right index finger print with actual ink. After that he said we were free to go and my green card would arrive at our Nebraska address within a few months. He also stamped my visa sticker on my passport, which will serve as my temporary green card for one year. All in all the immigration process took about 15 minutes, so it was pretty fast.

So now I'm officially a lawful permanent resident of the United States and an actual immigrant for the first time in my life, since my previous visas were non-immigrant visas. Feels weird :) 

We still don't know where we will be settling, but husband has already received one job offer, so we will not be staying in Nebraska, which is fine by me. We'll see what happens :)

Wishing everyone a wonderful week!