Miami

I promised a post on Miami. Here it is! I will try to cover at least our apartment today. 

First of all, we live on a small island--this island! We live just to the right of where it says "North" on North Bay Rd.

Here is a picture of our island. It really is that cool.

This is the apartment building we live in. It is ten stories tall. We live in an apartment behind those trees on the left.

I like this picture of our building (on the left) because it shows how close the beach is--about a block.

Our building has a couple nice things about it, like a gym and this pool and spa. It also has wireless access by the office. (I've never lived in a place with a gym or wireless before, not to mention a pool this nice.)

And this is our apartment! This is the view as you come in from the front door. (Yes, we are currently using the box our lamps came in as an end table.)

a better picture of our living room 

(Can I just say I love our floor to ceiling windows in this room and in the bedroom, and the curtains as well? I think they look really nice. I also love our plant that my mom got for us while she was here, our rocking chair that Tanner's amazing sister Brittney refurbished and gave to us, and the rug that Tanner and I chose to give the room more color. This room makes me happy. :) )

and looking back at the front door

(I plan on putting pictures up on that wall above the couch, by the way. I made the frames and just printed out all the pictures for them so we are getting close! When I put them up I will post a picture of the finished product.)

Here is the area to your right when you come in. It's not really important, but I just figured I might as well include it as long as I was showing everything else.

This is our guest bathroom to the left of the front door.

our dining area (You can see our bedroom door to the left and the kitchen door to the right.)

Here's to give you an idea of how the dining room is connected to the living room.

our bedroom

(And again, yes, we are using boxes as an end table here as well. We are still working on getting nightstands.)

looking back the other way

our bathroom

the rest of our bathroom

And finally, our kitchen! There isn't much storage space in the cupboards so we bought a bookcase for our dishes and small appliances.

looking the other way in the kitchen

the view from the kitchen--mostly the tops of a bunch of palm trees

There is a big green iguana that lives in them and I see him all the time. Here is a video I took of him yesterday. I felt like a real-life Nat Geo photographer! If only that had come through in the video.

the view from our living room window

the view from our bedroom window (The city is working on turning that empty lot into a park.)

 

Also, I didn't tell you before, but some things about our apartment building are really ghetto. Like these stalactites and stalagmites growing in our parking garage. There is a problem with water dripping through each level when it rains, and the drips are full of gunk that has built up over the years. There are probably hundreds of these deposits throughout the garage. Other ghetto things are the management and the construction going on. They are working on taking off all of the little balconies for some reason (which makes no sense to me since all of the living room windows are big sliding doors). This means they are using jackhammers in the cement of the walls from 8 to 5 every day, and the noise goes throughout the whole building. Sometimes (like today) the noise is so loud that it shakes our apartment. When it's loud like that, I can't really recover from staying up with Ezra, so that's been challenging; I'm sleep deprived a lot of the time. Ezra does better than I do at taking naps, which I am happy about. Today he slept like a baby. :)

As for everything (well, almost everything) else about Miami, I love it! It's hot, but I love the heat and I much prefer the worst days of heat in Miami to the best days of cold in Utah. Our ward is amazing but I don't want to talk too much about it here because it really deserves a post of its own. A few things about it though are that of the 10 wards in our stake, 8 are Spanish-speaking, which means that in addition to the English speakers, our ward gets all of the Haitian creole and ASL speakers, which creates a super fun and interesting dynamic. There are also a lot of podiatry students and their wives (9 couples total) as well as some PA students and wives, dental students and wives, etc. Anyways, it's fun.

I'm learning my way around--Tanner and I switch off with the car--and know by heart how to get to some essential places like the grocery store, the post office, the library, and Target. The beach is just across the street so I can take Ezra there at any time, or I can walk to the park which is even closer and is good to make loops of when I am trying to get exercise and put Ezra to sleep.

I went to the farmer's market with my new friends Star, Kendra, and Lyndsay (all wives of other 1st year podiatry students in the ward) on Saturday before General Conference, and found some cool things. This was one of them:

It's called a delicious monster. Once the green hexagons flake off, you can eat the inside, which tastes like a mix between a pineapple and a banana. It's super acidic so although it's sweet and good, you can't eat too much at one time, or it will sting your mouth like too much candy.

 Well, that's all for now! More posts and videos of Ezra coming up! In the meantime, here's a picture of him studying the dinosaurs on his arm. Love to all!