State of the Jezlyn

[Editor’s note #2: Post updated with my Brightkite link.]

[Editor's note: will update the post later with the link to my posts on Brightkite.  Inconveniently, Brightkite is down right now (6:27PM Central, Oct. 8). :P]

Hi, Kids.  I haven't officially blogged about this yet, so here's the scoop: the hubby & I are going to move out to the bay area in CA, hopefully by next spring.  It all really depends on how quickly we can get the house sold.

Last week we went out to CA to explore the San Jose area since the hubby will be transferring out to the office in Santa Clara.  It was basically a scouting mission to get acquainted with the various cities in the area, see potential neighborhoods we'd live in, get a feel for commuting & traffic, stuff like that.  Our main strategy was to look up places for rent online, then drive by them to check out whether or not we would like the area.  This helped us figure out places we will check out officially when we go out there.

If anyone has any suggestions or comments about where to live (rent) in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Milpitas, Cupertino, Mountain View, or San Jose, please let me know. 🙂

As for the trip itself, it went really well.  We both were really impressed with the bay area and were psyched to find out how much it fit with our interests.  For example, we love Japanes food & culture, and the Japanese stores and restaurants we checked out were great.  We'll definitely be spending a lot of time at Mitsuwa, Kinokuniya, Tomi Sushi, and discovering new places to try.  There was also an abundance of Filipino restaurants compared to here in Chicago.  Jollibee!  I have no idea why there isn't a Jollibee in chicago when there is a sizeable Filipino population here. >:-\  Moot now that we're moving.  We had two great Filipino dinners with my extended family on my mom's side, one at Tribu in San Bruno, and the other a couple nights later at Ongpin in South San Francisco.  Both kind of far from the Santa Clara/San Jose area, but worth the drive.  I might drive the hubby nuts driving around to try the different Filipino restaurants around, or finding Filipino grocery stores to frequent. 🙂

We hit a few malls (Valley Fair & Santana row, Great Mall (that's where the Jollibee is in Milpitas), and Oakridge Mall), a few Fry's Electronics to see the themes, and sampled Peet's coffee.  We tried to find the shopping areas to figure out where they would be in relation to where we'd live.  We didn't want to end up somewhere where it takes 20-30 mins just to do a quick grocery run.  Overall we wanted to pretend like we were already living there as a practice run.  And we were happy to find out that the Santa Clara/San Jose area fits in quite well with how we're used to living out here in the west Chicago suburbs, except it seems like it's a lot easier to get around, due to a better-planned road network. 😛  Oh yeah, we also had our first In-N-Out burgers, which were good, but nothing spectacular, IMO. *shrug*  Anyway, if you check out my posts on Brightkite, you'll get an idea of where we all went.  I used it to kind of help me remember where we visited.

I've rambled on long enough, even though I've only glossed over some of the major things we did.  It was a great trip, & we're excited to be moving out there.  The hubby said at one point, "Why haven't we moved here sooner?"  That's how good it was. 🙂

October 8, 2009 | Categories: awesome, bay area, CA, handwriting, ink, ink blogging, moving, personal | Leave a comment