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!