Starting from scratch

I started writing this post in November last year, its April now, I thought I rather post it than letting it sit in my drafts.

It is been a day we left everything behind and trying to find a place that we can call home.

We moved from our beloved city Chicago, to do better in our jobs in the west coast. We moved to the place I always said no to, when a recruiter would ask me if I am OK for positions in the bay area.

Starting from zero sucks, the first night here felt the way I felt when i moved from India, I have a better quilt and a phone to reach anyone in any corner of the world as compared to what I had when I moved from india back in 2010, but I don't have anything that I'd call my belongings - my bed, my TV, my home. But, I have my husband by my side and my plants that we managed to bring here on our flight with us. It was the same like how we entered  this country, packing all our stuff in 2 bags.

I will use this space to put down my house searching stories, so I can go back to this and read about what I sign myself for when I decide to move states, moving apartments and houses, I am pretty used to by now, moving an apartment every 1.5 year ah! but moving states I am scared and nervous of, coz you start from zero and have to find each and everything again, grocery shops, meat wala, your favorites joints of bakeries, coffee, the lady who'd trim my eyebrows 🥴 and restaurants etc and of all people/ friends who I can talk to, in the form of friends, neighbors and acquaintances, finding  the former is easier than later.

Anyways, day 1 - we reached our temporary accommodation, dropped our bags and went to say hi to one of siva's friend who lived nearby. 

I am not working this week and we thought we will look around places and check the vibe of places. So, we were eager to go see which area siva's friend lives in, because this was the neighborhood we initially thought of living but it would be too far from siva's office, once we knew the location of sivas new job our search engine crashed and we had to focus in a area on other side of the bay called Fremont. Indians get happy when they hear Fremont, because it's little India, all the Indian married people with kids live in this area coz it has a good school district and the rents are a little cheap. So, we thought let's do Fremont, but my brother happened to visit Fremont 2 weeks ago and hated Fremont and told us how dry the place is blah blah and our search engine crashed again.

Siva then started looking for places in the San Francisco and it's suburbs and that was our first day of house hunting. We were excited as we drove through the freeways around mountains and with so much vegetation. We first went to a place on ocean bay, the vibe was excellent and would make you feel like you are on a vacation, everyone in the area was chilled out and very hip. One of my criteria for home is a place where we have some indian community, not a lot but some. In SF and suburbs, all day I kept trying to see if there was any indian community, we only found people in cars but nowhere in the apartments we chose to tour. Also, the units we saw didn't fit even 50% of our liking criteria. We had about 5 appointments made, we saw 3 and skipped two because even the neighborhood or surroundings of the apartments didn't click for us to begin with.

Day 1: We completed our search for apartments in SF and came to a conclusion that our city living in Chicago can't be compared to living in the San Francisco city, we kept homelessness aside, but still nothing matched.

On the way back home we decided to drive by a different city, small but had some charm to it, it was a place called foster city. It had small water bodies, not sure lakes or ponds or shores, but it had parks built around the water body which was nice. So, we started to look apartments in this area, but it turned out that the parks and stores for grocery etc are far away from the residential area and the apartments close to the parks were too expensive, so we left that option too.

On the weekend we  thought we will give Fremont a try. We saw 2-3 apartments, the place didn’t have any charm to it, it was dry and felt like people living there had no life or happiness/excitement, I feel this in general about people living in the Bay Area, that they have no life, they work and talk about stocks all day trying to make more money and hike, period. 

Within a day or two of moving from Chicago, I understood I made a blunder, I shouldn’t have just decided to move cities just because I wasn’t happy with my work. I don’t know if this will change, but lessons learnt.  

 Anyways, after searching every neighborhood we moved to a small city called redwood city, north of the silicon valley, it is decent, nothing exciting as compared to Chi town, I will probably move again next year in November and you will see a 'moving again' post then! 😉