How much can we pack into one week? Parks, picnics and pals

Hello friends! What a week it's been 😮 It's Emily here to start off our rundown of what's been happening in Cali.

Sunday morning we were up bright and early to catch the bus to DISNEYLAND!! Well, Downtown Disney, which is the shopping district just outside all of the theme parks and is free to walk around and see. It took about an hour and half to get there and the bus dropped us off right outside. We spent a nice couple of hours visiting a giant Disney Store which was full of t-shirts, toys and other gifts, the new Star Wars Trading Post which had toys and collectibles (and lots of baby yoda mechandise) and the lego store which had loads of lego statues of various characters. 

There were also deconstructed displays of all of the original Disney characters hidden in parts of the gardens which you could only see when you looked at them from certain angles. 

It's Pluto!

We bought a giant cookie from the sweet shop which seemed to be staffed exclusively by nice old ladies and had a look around some of the more 'grown-up' stores which sold Disney themed mugs and dresses. In one of these they had a wall full of artworks which were incredibly beautiful, but pretty pricey, especially as we don't have a wall to hang them on. As we were leaving though, we saw a rack of large postcards and they had some of the art pieces on these! So we are now the proud owners of a postcard size Disneyland artwork. 

Ariel watching the ship

I wasn't kidding about it being giant

This was also the first day Mitchell wore shorts, and while it was sunny back in Riverside, in LA that day it was pretty cloudy so his knees still remain very pale.

Bringing the blue to California myself

Monday (which was also a bank holiday for us - or technically a 'public holiday' to celebrate memorial day) we caught up with a friend over zoom in the morning and then headed out for a picnic. We walked through the Downtown area which we've done a few times, but carried on a bit further and got to one of the larger parks. It was lovely there, lots of trees to sit in the shade of while we ate and full of families enjoying the sun. 

It was obviously a popular day to visit the park as there were several groups out with gazebos, barbeques full tables heaped with food. After eating our small pile of sandwiches, we went for a walk around the little lake. It was very pretty and seemed to have an island in the middle made completely of floating palm trees.

Is there a floor? Who knows?

Proof that Mitchell does indeed own a pair of legs

I had been on the lookout the whole time we were there for a shop selling ice-creams or cold drinks, but other than a few people pushing carts selling undefined snacks, there wasn't really anything. So, on the way home we stopped off at the Riverside Food Lab again and ordered some chocolate shakes. When our order was ready they placed up too very full cups of shake and presented us with two spoons. And no straws. Turns out these are the kinds of shake you scoop like ice-cream. They were very tasty, but not quite what we were expecting!

Mitchell consuming roughly his own body weight in sugar

Hey it's Mitchell, Emily's making sure that I don't miss out on contributing to the blog (which is good because I do want to despite being busy) by making sure I write about the stuff she can't write about or the boring stuff so!

I've been working obviously, not counting the 3 day weekend. On Tuesday I went onto campus for a little intro to the labs, meet my supervisor for the first time in person and they had a little social occasion as a few people are soon to leave the lab, I just arrived and a PhD student had recently passed one of their examination steps (I don't know exactly what). I ate before hand as I wasn't sure if we were meant to be eating together, turns out not only were we eating together, food had been bought for us! It turned out it was lucky I'd eaten before hand as since I didn't know this was happening I hadn't warned anyone I was vegetarian so it was mostly meat. I did get to eat a load of doughnuts though.

I'll be getting keys and a lab coat on Tuesday so that'll be my proper start in the lab date. On Friday I popped into the lab as well to try and locate some stuff and set up my laptop on the wifi there, primarily because I was getting a bit tired of working in the flat!

This week we've also been kept pretty busy with the rental process, last Thursday we'd been given the impression we would have heard that Friday. On Tuesday we still didn't hear anything and tried to contact them and on Wednesday we were told that our bank accounts weren't proof of my American income! If they'd told us that was why they wanted them I could have told them that! Thanks to all these delays I have now had my first payslip so I was able to send that over (along with my contract. Again.) Later that day we were told we'd been approved and should be able to move in Friday! I got some vague info over the phone and was told I would be e-mailed it shortly. But I knew I had to set up the electricity and renters insurance before we'd be allowed to move in. We started looking at that but without the address couldn't do anything. Midday Thursday I got another call, they'd accidentally not told me before but the deposit was going to be more, since that was one of the best outcomes we were predicting due to our completely absent credit score that wasn't really a problem, I got the address and some more detail on what we had to set up and were going to be e-mailed the contract to sign digitally! That arrived almost immediately but was locked behind a PIN which we hadn't been provided so were completely useless... 

Now we obviously needed dollars for the first months rent and deposit. Now this is a long story but basically between trying to use a UK bank account at exactly midnight causing the site to get confused about the date, trying some transactions multiple times and the fact that instead of sort codes American bank accounts have routing numbers (and ours has three of those) we ended up with a LOT of money in limbo between accounts and the amount for the rent should be arriving in our American account by Monday, with some other money potentially coming through or bouncing back on Monday.

We then had to set up the insurance and the electricity. The electricity is just managed by the local authority and there's no companies, surprisingly, the set up needed ID and since I didn't have US ID we had to go in person, fortunately the office was only a short walk from us. Going in they had those temperature forehead scanners, generally they haven't been worth me mentioning these but this one HATED Emily. It went off which involved an alarm going for like half a minute. The same thing happened after Emily waited a bit to cool down in the air con. The guy at the door then pulled out a handheld one and scanned Emily just fine. However both at this point in the office and online when trying to set up the insurance we hit the same road block, the apartment number we'd been given apparently didn't exist.

The calls I tried to make at the office just went to voicemail so I sent a load of e-mails and suggested we wait until Monday as we'd have the dollars by then. Later in the day we got replies to all e-mails saying Monday is good and a slightly more useful flat number (apparently both are appropriate but the one we were originally given is the new number they use so that isn't reflected in a lot of records). So we went back to the electricity office just before it closed, the temperature scanner screamed at Emily again and we got it sorted!

The next day all the money had come through just fine to all the accounts we wanted it. We got sent new contracts to sign but again no PIN! After most of the day Emily managed to get a call through, we got the PIN we signed the contracts and now just need to get the payment ready for Monday!

The only thing we need now is to get the money in a form we can use to pay which is a cashier's check. I'd not heard of these before but maybe they do exist in the UK too? Basically we pay the bank and then they write a check from the bank to the people we want to pay for the exact amount, so it's a check which we've already paid for so they know it won't bounce.

Emily here, to carry on the exciting parts of the story of us 🌟

Saturday was a busy day for us, we had a long list of things we wanted to do, including getting the cashiers cheque ready for Monday. So the Bank was our first stop. Unfortunately, when we got there, we were told that the whole network was down across the country and we could only access the ATMs and we would have to wait until Monday to talk to a teller. We're not sure what was going on exactly, as when we went to a different branch later in the day, it seemed to be open and working just fine. However, we had arrived at that second branch pretty late and was due to close in 10 minutes so we left it with our fingers crossed that the Bank wouldn't be broken on Monday morning too. 

We then went to the Mall! We knew they were big shopping centres, but based on how much Americans seem to love them, we thought they'd be a bit more.. something? It literally was laid out just like at home, but with a food court area and outdoor seating (beacuse it's California). We got a big slice of cheesy pizza each and went for a look around the shops. They were mainly clothes shops with a few nerdy ones and a department store thrown in. 

Mitchell and his 'za

After that, we went for a visit to Target (and nearly bought some dinosaur sheets, but they were the wrong size 😭) We needed a tape measure to measure the space for a fridge in our new apartment, but we couldn't find one there, so we went to the bank and then back to the mall for frozen yoghurt. 

Fro Yo! Plus a healthy portion of chocolate chips

By this time it was almost 3pm (and we had started out at 9:30 that morning) so we hopped back on the  bus and went for some groceries. We also managed to find a tape measure there in the Rite Aid next door!

Sunday we went for a hike up Mount Rubidoux again, but took a different route up this time. I took my camera and got some pretty good shots of some lizards sunning themselves on the rocks. 

Hello 🦎

In the afternoon, we met another new international postdoc and his wife for a picnic. We visited a new side of town and got to ride past our new apartment on the bus which was very exciting! It seems like a very nice area and the people we met actually live in one of the other apartment blocks nearby. They were very friendly and we all brought food from where we're from. They were from Switzerland/Italy so brought some Swiss cheese and focaccia while we brought English muffins and blackberries. We're hoping to meet up again once we've moved and have an oven so that we can bake some scones for them. 

A lovely place for a picnic (except for all the ants)

We met in the Sycamore Canyon Wilderness Park which has over 25 miles of trails and some amazing views. Once we move we'll be able to explore the park a lot more as it's so close to where we will be living. We didn't stay for long as Marissa got bitten by one of the ants that was trying to get into our picnic, but they were very nice and even drove us home and gave us some tips on finding a good car.

Making friends!

That's it from us, Mitchell and Emily signing off and very much looking forward to our new apartment tomorrow!

XOXO

These people have a new apartment!