Whew. We more or less collapsed yesterday -- didn't get any unpacking done. I played a computer game. The one thing I did do is set up my stereo. I had to spend a while searching around in boxes for missing pieces, but I think it'll be worth it to have some tunes.

So, about the place. It is about 5 miles north of downtown and 7 miles south of Northwestern. It's a half block from the northern extension of Lincoln Park -- which is on the water. Lake Shore Drive (an 8 lane expressway) separates us from the water, but there are a couple of convenient underpasses.

Our place is on the third floor of a three-story walk up. It was heavily rehabbed in the 70's, so it has central air, but lacks some of the original detailing you could see in other condos. We really like this place, but it was the neighborhood that really sold us on it. The condo itself has two bedrooms plus a back room. There is a really large sun room off of the leaving room -- basically making the living room L-shaped. The kitchen and breakfast-nook have been combined to make a very large kitchen. And one of the previous owners (not the very last one), put these Antique lockers from a girl's school in the kitchen. It is certainly the most interesting feature to the interior. They are very pretty. Recently, we put cork down on all of the shelves before we put stuff in them.






As far as the larger neighborhoods go, we are on the border between Uptown and Edgewater. Both of these places had pretty bad reputations, say, back in the 70's and 80's. Their heyday was in the 20's-40's, where they were some of the most posh parts of Chicago. Unfortunately, a lot of that history has been torn down, but still a good amount of it remains. Today, Uptown is more ethnically diverse (especially West African), and has more public housing -- in fact, it is the major area with public housing on the North Side. Edgewater is a bit more residential / gentrifying.

Our more immediate neighborhood is Argyle, the street just one block to the south of us. This is primarily a Vietnamese neighborhood (I'm told a number of the Vietnamese are ethnically Chinese), with 20+ Vietnamese restaurants, as well as a good number of Chinese restaurants and 3-4 Thai restaurants. There are also 4-5 good sized Asian grocery stores. I walk down Argyle to get on the el, and as you walk down there, you are likely to hear a lot of Vietnamese and/or Chinese (not sure I can tell the difference), Spanish, and some Slavic languages. Sorry, I haven't taken any pictures here, but I will soon.

On Argyle, we've been to three different Vietnamese restaurants so far and a Chinese one. I wasn't sure whether the Asian food here would meet our California standards, but it has. Perhaps not as good as the best places I've been to in CA, but still really good. Our two favorites are this banh mi (Vietnamese sandwich) place (Ba Le) and a Chinese one (Honeymoon cafe). The banh mi place has a very good tofu sandwich, is jam-packed with Vietnamese at lunch time, and has the best fresh fruit smoothies. Somehow fresh fruit smoothies (with boba) are really popular among the Asian community here -- more so than I've seen elsewhere. We ran into the Chinese place basically by accident, looking for a meal one night. We were walking down the street, most of the restaurants weren't very busy, and then this little single-storefront-wide place was absolutely packed. Turned out two of the big tables were taken up by a wedding party or something, but still, it was a good sign. We were the only Caucasians in there. We had an absolutely amazing meal. The highlight was the soft "Japanese" tofu, fried, with salt and pepper. By far the best version of this dish I've had.

Even closer to us than Argyle are a couple of other cool places. The absolutely closest place to us -- half a block from our condo, on Sheridan -- is the bar Big Chicks and sister restaurant Tweet (actually called "Tweet....let's eat" but let's ignore that). These two establishments are connected and share a central room. From 9 AM - 2 PM Tweet serves brunch. It is a quite good brunch -- and extremely popular. We recently had to wait 40 minutes on a Friday. Tweet is an extremely straight-friendly gay bar, that also serves burgers and fries, etc. We've been to each place a couple of times now and enjoyed it -- the atmosphere at Big Chicks is actually just awesome. Tuns of interesting art on the walls and really relaxed/enjoyable.

The other place near us is this Pakistani taxi cab hang out, Shan foods. The last time we went, the food was really, really good -- approaching Vic's territory, in my mind (although quite different style -- more densely spiced). Unfortunately, I got rather pissed off by the waiter, so I'm going to need to give myself some time to reset myself before going back. All the cab drivers were sitting in one room, watching TV. We sat down with them, and the waiter asked us to go and sit by ourselves in the other room. I tried to go back, but the waiter's English wasn't very good and so we just dealt with it -- but it pissed me off.

So anyway, that's about it. I have to say, the neighborhood has been everything I've hoped for. And so far we haven't really explored it much. We've only been out to the lake once -- I think that'll be a great place for walks and bike rides. I'm less than a mile walk -- or one el stop -- from a jazz club (the Green Mill). We can also take about a mile walk to Andersonville, if we want the sort of place that has lots of little boutiques and things.