I may have gotten a little ahead of myself in calling this a weekly feature, but I will continue to post updates on life here in my Nomadtopia, albeit perhaps at more sporadic intervals. I’m also going to start including more photos from my own travels—I hope you enjoy them!

Since Roberto still has an office job, for the time being we have to pick and choose vacation times and places just like any other average Joe. He chose next week as one of his weeks off for this year (he only gets two weeks, after having been at his job for just over a year), and we’ve just booked a few nights at this lovely place. It’s in a town called Tandil, about five hours south of Buenos Aires. I’ve been to Tandil before, and it should be a nice little getaway. We may then hide out in the city for a while and not tell anyone we’re in town. :)

(As a side note, the vacation system in Argentina is very strange to me. At many companies, you can only take your vacation during certain periods of the year—at Roberto’s current job, it’s between October and April, which roughly equates to summer here—and you have to take a full week at a time, rather than adding a day to a long weekend, for example. The upside is that by law, you get 10 days off when you get married!)

On another note, it turns out that it’s not just your average person who wants to know where we’re going to live after we get married—our countries’ governments want to know, too! And again, they assume there are just two options: here and there.We recently had a rather alarming conversation with a few other American-Argentine couples about their visa/immigration situations—as many travelers and expats know, the subject conjures up lots of hearsay and anecdotes, which really do nothing but make us nervous. Feeling the need to track down some more concrete information, we went to see an immigration lawyer last week, and asked a few questions of a US immigration lawyer as well.

The lawyer here gave us the impression that it will be quite straightforward for me to obtain residency in Argentina once we’re married, but, well, this is Argentina, and I’ll believe it when I see the stamped papers in my hand! And so far we’ve determined that it doesn’t make sense to go through the trials and tribulations of getting Roberto a green card until we actually have a plan to live in the U.S. for any length of time (i.e., not any time soon).

I haven’t read a novel in ages—recently I’ve mostly been reading ebooks about minimalism, online business, etc.—but I just finished reading Her Fearful Symmetry, by the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife. Wow! It’s a real page-turner, and I finished it quickly, but I didn’t find the ending totally satisfying. I really love reading, and I need to do more of it—offline, away from the computer. There’s just nothing like getting wrapped up in a good book.