A little more talk and a lot less pictures (none actually)

Don't worry I'm fully aware that posts without pictures are far less appealing than those with pictures but I'm going to tell a few stories anyways.  Now that we're settled in I think I will do better at taking my camera with us when we go places so that I can appease the masses with pictures of us doing cool stuff.

Appliances:  I am pretty sure that we did our best to come into this whole moving-to-a-foreign-country-thing prepared.  We called police stations, googlestreetviewed the whole neighborhood (add that one to the dictionary), set up our utilities in advance, etc.  So don't blow this story off with the idea that I just didn't think to settle these issues (some in my family would probably assume that of me).  I told my landlord, we'll call him Jeff, two months ago that we needed a fridge and he gave me this story about how he would call the office and send one to our apartment right then - no problem!  One month later we signed a lease that specified what furniture or appliances would be included with the unit.  A fridge was the ONLY thing listed.  This whole time I was also repeatedly asking him the measurements of the washer and dryer space.  If I counted all the e-mails I sent including that inquiry I think it would be at least 3, possibly 5.  He kept saying he'd get it and then finally in a phone conversation I asked him again and he just said "oh it's the normal size".  So I went with it figuring I wasn't going to get much more out of him.  Chalise and I went and spent $800 on a side-by-side washer and dryer set and we were quite satisfied with our purchase.

We arrive on Monday and terror of all terrors!  OK that might be a little dramatic but it was a little discouraging to see that there was no fridge and the spot for the washer and dryer was obviously made for stacking units.  I asked him where the fridge was and he has no idea whether or not we should have a fridge here.  I assure him that the lease included a fridge, he calls the office then feeds us this line that we're lucky because it actually shouldn't have included a fridge it was just a clerical mistake by his secretary.  This is balogna because he's the one who put it on there but who cares because he promises that the fridge will get there that same day by about 4.  After many phone calls and texts the fridge finally showed up begrudgingly 3 days later!  The arrival of our fridge was the running joke for almost four whole days.  Luckily we can finally eat home-cooked food and no longer have an excuse to eat out for every meal.  Aside from the initial frustration the washer and dryer situation actually turned out quite nicely and I would like to give props to all my peeps at Sears for hooking us up there.  The Sears building that we went to was seriously frightening - they easily one-upped the Tower of Terror (this observation is duly attributed to Courtney Bullard) and they were so insanely busy that I feared the worst.  In the end they actually had the best customer service I've ever had, willingly took back the washer and dryer that we bought lightly used from a Sears in Logan, and they waived my delivery fee completely!  Don't worry we've got our appliances all sorted out now.

GPS Dependence:  Shortly before we moved it occurred to me that we should probably get a GPS navigator so we wouldn't get lost everyday.  The timing worked out nicely because Mike and Trish were contemplating getting one that they could use for the trip to Europe that would end right before we left town.  So they got it and it worked out OK for them (apparently the European map package leaves something to be desired) and they passed it off to us just in time for our departure.  The pass-off was truly a buzzer-beater but that's the stuff of their blog and not mine so I'll leave it at that.  We used it driving to our apartment and then we used Chalise's dad's built in Garmin the whole time they were here and we loved it.  We felt like we could not go one block without it.  We started using ours again in earnest on Thursday and it was amazing!  And then the unthinkable!  It led us to a Wal-Mart on Crenshaw Blvd without a problem.  As a side note:  DO NOT go to that Wal-Mart ever!  It puts the the markets of Soviet Russia to shame (that is a reference to empty shelves).  We took a little detour on the way home to another grocery store to get some meat and it was not the most comfortable part of town.  There was a homeless hangout next door around an abandoned shopping center and it just had that Gotham City feel to it.  Imagine the shock when we re-boarded the vehicle and the Garmin was frozen - truly and genuinely frozens.  Reset: failed.  Master Reset: failed.  Reset again: failed.  Chalise bashing it on her leg: failed.  Freaking out and practically weeping because we seriously do not know how to get home: also didn't make it work.  At this point we learned a serious lesson about being dependent on a navigation device.  The lesson is that it's not a good idea!

Don't worry we felt our way home and by divine providence (I'm being serious here) we made it with only one mistake that was close to home and didn't take too long to figure out.  As far as the GPS is concerned, they're going to replace it for free and we'll use it but we're grateful for the 10-14 days that we'll have without it to learn the rudimentary skills of metropolitan navigation.

Cabinets and Beaches:  Yesterday we decided to finally break down and deep clean the few areas of our apartment that weren't clean when we moved in, including the bathrooms, the kitchen and the floors.  Everything was a breeze except for the kitchen cabinets.  Those things could've gagged a maggot!  There was grease so thick that you could squish it under your finger!  The grease smelled of a mixture of rancid cat food and fish guts (believe me I've tasted both).  After several attempts with Murphy's oil and Fantastik we finally discovered that the problem spots were best treated with SOS pads. Once the thick grease was gone the Murphy's worked really well on the wood.  After about three hours of scrubbing we decided to reward ourselves with a trip to the beach!

I really wish I would've had my camera because Venice Beach is hilarious.  They had some good waves and some of the most interesting people I have ever come across in my entire life.  I'll tell you more about it after our return trip when I have some pictures to go along.  For now let it suffice to say that we will be going to the beach as often as we can - hopefully once a week.  We love it.

Movin' On Up

Some of you may not know this, but Chalise and I moved to Los Angeles this week and we already have a million stories about our escapades here.  First things first though, we are so grateful that Chalise's family could drive here with us and help us move in - it seriously wouldn't have been possible without them.  I'm posting some pictures of our new place for everyone who hasn't seen it yet (which is everyone reading this).  When we first got off the freeway and started driving toward our apartment that we had never seen (except pictures online - risky!  I know) we were starting to think that we made a horrible mistake because it was looking like some terrible mixture between Tijuana and the Bronx.  Once we got to our apartment our fears were allayed.  We are incredibly lucky to have found this place for the price range we were looking in.  We're somewhere in between Chinatown and Koreatown and 90% of our neighbors are Korean as far as I can tell - which is fine by us.  We'd heard terrible things about how rude everyone is here but so far I've been very happy with how nice people have been.  A neighbor lady came out and talked to us while we were moving for a good 10 minutes, the appliance lady at Sears helped us out big time, another neighbor welcomed us to the neighborhood when we were out on a walk, and the list could go on and on.  In a nutshell: today's lesson is that people are nice and decent wherever you go even in Los Angeles.  Anyway on to the pictures.

View from our South window in the evening.  Downtown LA is about 1 mile from our door.

It's definitely a new thing for us to see the sunset and palm trees in the horizon - it still feels a little bit like vacation

We didn't have anywhere to put our grill so we put behind our building in a little common area.  We fully expected it to be stolen that night but it remains to this day.  I'll update you when it's finally stolen.

Looking down our street from our front door.  You can see that the neighborhood actually looks pretty decent.  I can't stress enough how fortunate we feel for that.

This is the view of our street away from downtown.  This hill is beasty steep and I'm excited to ride my bike up it everyday on my way home.  From the top of this hill you're actually looking down right on the parking lots for Dodgers' Stadium.

My bike will be stored in our kitchen for security purposes.

We are also incredibly lucky that the apartment is actually quite spacious considering it's a steal of a deal.
 

You can't see it but to the right of the bed there's a little entrance to our balcony - which is tiny and really ghetto but it's still a cool feature.

One of these things is not like the other.  We didn't quite have enough closet space for all of our storage so this is our  attempt to camouflage it.

The babies room is probably the best looking one in the place.

The security of our front door is definitely noteworthy.

All of the other apartments in our building have an additional padlock on their screen door which we lack, so if anyone in our building goes down it'll probably be us!