transported

so i love my new apartment. as in love love love it! it’s the perfect size, spacious yet cosy, the heater’s working very well, there’s very hot water very quickly, lovely tan carpeting throughout the apartment, a very well equipped kitchen (with stove, baking oven, microwave oven, dishwasher, toaster, coffee maker, kettle, tons of utensils, pots and pans and dinnerware, tons of storage space, absolutely gorgeous furniture and an overall “shabby chic” aesthetic. which i love (: i haven’t had the time to do a photoshoot of the place yet but i will soon! i only wish my camera could do the place justice, which of course it couldn’t because a great part of this apartment’s charm is in how comfortable we feel in it. it’s so lovingly furnished yet doesn’t feel like it came out of a magazine, it feels lived in so to speak. there’s a huge wooden black and white “painting” (not quite sure what medium but very nice) of the 3 girls that live here and several awesome photoboards of them hung up around the apartment. oh and the apartment has a big TV with cable and a dvd player and folding doors that open to reveal a set of laundry washer and dryer.

so there are 3 rooms in the apartment. mine’s the masterbedroom, sort of, and in between weifen’s room and rochelle’s. rochelle is the only girl out of the 3 original girls who will be staying here. she’s only coming on sunday, so her room’s still locked. so anyway, my room has pretty seafoam green walls, cream curtains, vintage posters, a few gorgeous antique-looking decor pieces, really nice matching off-white table and chair with suede seating and matching shelf, a queen-sized bed and matching full-length mirror, a WALK-IN WARDROBE (the pathetic amount of clothes i brought looks extra pathetic in there) a WALK-IN vanity area with a sink and cupboards and mirrors lining both walls and great lighting, which leads to the bathroom that has a bathtub! lauren even hung up some dried flowers next to the study table (:

okay i guess it’ll be clearer once i post up some photos.. oh and weifen’s room is a little smaller but very nicely furnished with a really nice chest of drawers and she also has an attached bathroom but without the vanity area and it’s connected to the outside corridor so rochelle shares it too. oh and the BEST part of the apartment, in my opinion, is the living area. they’ve got these lovely lovely slouchy green corduroy couches with pretty pillows and throws and a coffee table and TV table that goes with the whole shabby chic look. whats better is that the couch is positioned right under one of the heater vents, which makes it naturally my favourite spot (: i was even contemplating sleeping on that couch on our first night since i hadn’t bought bedding yet!

gosh, 2 days of not blogging and so many stories to telllll.

a few highlights? weifen and i didn’t shower for 3 days. okay well weifen for 3 days and me for 2 cus she’d been on the plane for 16 hours. when we first arrived we couldn’t figure out how to turn on the shower… and neither of us had gotten a line that we could use to call lauren to ask her yet, AND to make matters worse, we couldn’t connect to the internet because we didn’t know the password to the wifi in the apartment. and we couldn’t call lauren/annie to ask them that either. eventually, after we discovered a drawer full of odds and ends including receipts for internet bills and what not, we came across (in our desperation) the password scrawled on some corner of some bill. and we tried it, after having tried thousands of different ones, and it worked! but by then it was so late, we had to wait till the next day to get a reply from lauren/annie so we went to sleep without showering. they didn’t reply the next morn and we had to get to school asap to pay our health insurance so they don’t drop our classes (deadline was originally 29th dec.) so we went without showering. good thing its winter… but even then i felt pretty gross.. can’t imagine how weifen could tahan not showering since leaving singapore! we were so desperate we almost went down to the pool bathroom.. but of course, we’d have frozen to death. not worth a bath i think.

okay so another highlight, or rather, one point i have to make. the public transportation system in davis and yolo county is… kanasai. i’ve never really used that term before, but i believe it applies here. never again will i take public transportation for granted in singapore. within davis, there’s unitrans which is a student-run bus service. that’s pretty good, the drivers are UC Davis students so they’re quite helpful and understanding about blur newbies like us. and it runs quite frequently and on schedule.. well rather. oh and bus stops are frequently seen. BUT, they only run till about 7 plus pm. hopefully its because term hasn’t started… because i can’t imagine how i’d get back from school if i ended class after that. we did walk today from school to home, but it gets DARK like singapore 10pm dark at about 5.30pm here. its really disconcerting because we grow anxious and urgent when we sense that its growing dark, but when we check the time its only 5.30pm. so that’s the unitrans.

but today we wanted to go to target to get bedding.. and the nearest one is at woodland which is out of davis.. so while opening our bank account we asked about which bus to take to get there and they told us how to get there… but after walking 3-blocks after 3 blocks (with everyone we ask after 3 blocks telling us its 3 more blocks down) past the cemetery and over the highway with the sky dark as night (when it wasn’t night), we thought we saw the bus coming up behind us and we started running (because the bus only runs every hour and we weren’t about to wait an hour in the FREEZING COLD after walking so far), and i tripped and fell right in the middle of a main road with the pedestrian crossing light red. thank god there were no cars then or i’d have been squashed, to say the least. it was a weird feeling falling, because my body was pretty numb from the cold, so it was almost as if i couldn’t feel myself falling at all at first, until i hit the ground and my knee and hands started stinging really bad. we then sat on the pavement for a while, each holding a white stuffed horse (which was a free gift from the bank for opening an account, together with a free $25 credited into our account because today was the first day of the quarter) looking like tramps, crazy tramps.

so it was all pretty depressing and gloomy, but adventurous nonetheless. oh turns out that bus we were chasing wasn’t the right bus at all. in the end the bus stop we came to, didnt have the bus that went to target, but a bus that went ALL THE WAY BACK to campus where we started from. so we were about to give up when the bus stopped at a stop where there was a 42A right in front of it about to pull away. that was the bus we were looking for!!! so we hopped off and ran after it, and when we got on, the lady driver barked at us that she wouldn’t do that next time. that meaning stop after she’s pulled away from the kerb. i told her we just got off the bus behind and we had to run because this (bloody) bus only runs every hour and is NEVER ON TIME and we’re COLD and she was downright mean and grumpy and idiotic. i would’ve punched her if i wasn’t influenced by the don’t abuse bus drivers policy in singapore. so this bus dropped us at the county fair mall in woodland, where we had to change to another bus 212 i think, that brought us to target.

i love target.

anyway, after we left target, the last bus from target back to the county fair mall had left. and we were in a different town so we couldn’t take a cab, not that there was any in sight. in fact, i haven’t seen one since i’ve been here. so we were stranded like 2 strands of bee hoon in a bowl of tom yum soup. hot soup. that’s when we had to ask for a ride from strangers… 2nd time’s a charm and we got a lift from a nice couple. dangerous we know… and i think hitchhiking is illegal in the states.. but we had NO CHOICE. anyway. we got a lift to the county fair mall, which was still not in davis anyway, and we JUST missed the bus that took us back to davis so we waited a whole hour in the COLD COLD trying to entertain ourselves and keep talking so we don’t get paralysed by the cold.. and when the bus came the driver told us this was the LAST BUS. lucky us. BUT, he said it didn’t go to our apartment, only to campus, which was quite a walk to our apartment especially in the late night cold and darkness. FORTUNATELY… this girl told us she lived pretty close to us and that there was a service called the davis campus escorts that she was planning to use and that we should join her. apparently if its late at night and you needed to go someone from campus, you could call a number and they’d send someone to pick out up wherever on campus, and take you to your destination for free! so weifen and i were super pleasantly surprised… we thought oh how sweet!! turns out, when we called them once we reached campus, they only drove people around within the campus. so to cut the long disappointing transportation story short, we ended up walking with the girl (monica, a 3rd year linguistics student who just came back from LA where she lives and lost her luggage containing 3 prom dresses and her ipod dock along the way, and who wants to be a preschool teacher after grad school) to baskin robbins downtown (quite a walk) to meet her friend who would be done with work at 11pm and could give us a lift back home. they dropped us off at safeway and we bought one roasted chicken and chicken strips and a deviled potato salad and walked home in utter longing of our warm, lovely apartment.

so we’ve had dinner, washed up, took our first long, hot, satisfying bath… and here i am! telling you all about it.

tomorrow we’d wanted to go to the farmer’s market where local produce is sold downtown, but it starts at 8am and i dont think we’ll make it. but we’re going to explore downtown (when we wake up), and hopefully get me a phone and some bedroom slippers/booties. in the meantime i’m off to bed (with my new green jersey t-shirt material bedsheets and pillowcases from target!)

another day… in davis. (: