I haven’t posted for a while as I was getting ready for the wedding. Now, I have been married around 10 days and I am absolutely LOVING the married life. It enriches life in a way that you think you can imagine but at the same time you won’t fully understand until you are there. In any case, it has been the most hectic, yet amazing last 2-3 weeks and only now the new life is returning to somewhat normal, which means it is time to start looking for jobs, getting social security number(SSN), getting a driver’s license and a number of other stuff that has to be done.

Let’s start with the driver’s license. I was kinda dreading the idea of having to study a thick book of rules with hard tests as I had to do back in Finland many years ago (or so it felt at least). Here, you walk in to the DMV (department of motor vehicles), get a small compendium of driving rules and study them while you wait in line, when it’s your turn 20 minutes later, you answer 20 questions on a computer screen and viola! All you need to is to do a small practical test and you have a driver’s license. What I have realized is also that without a SSN, or driver’s license you can’t do anything in this country.

Here is a small detail I enjoy as I discovered it the other night. Very late in at night as we were about to watch a movie, we had no ice cream or pop corn, nor had we remembered to buy cat food for our cat so the poor thing had gone hungry for two days, and I learned that most supermarkets are open 24/7 here. That is a nice service I must admit that I have missed out on all my life.

Moving on to the financial part of life, opening a bank account was a breeze since I could let my lovely wife be the primary and I get to tag along and share the account. This way noone cared who I was or what my SSN is. Getting a credit card on my name is a different story. Like everywhere else you need a job for that, but here is the difference; here in the states, the only way you build a good line of credit is to apply and get several credit cards, spend randomly on each of them and pay your bill on time. That is what is considered being able to manage finances here apparently, quite unusual I think…

And the never end saga of immigration continues. One thing that really frustrates me here is the amount of paperwork you have to submit for anything you wanna do. In regards to immigration procedures multiply the paperwork by five and for each round you have to submit whatever you submitted last plus another pile of new forms that have nothing but repetition of what you told them in the previous round.

Anyways, we still haven’t had gotten our pictures from the wedding, apparently it take 6 weeks for the photographer to edit them, but we are in no hurry. So far we haven’t even had a chance to open the wedding gifts yet. For now, we are just trying to the most important things out of the way so we can start looking for jobs and enjoy our time a little more and who knows, even plan a getaway.

Hopefully I will also be able to post on new gadgets and technical discoveries soon as I have been out of touch with my rss feeds for over a month.