a day in the life

well i am starting to get used to life in the big city. i would not say i'm adapted yet, but i at least know how to get to school and back without using the GPS. i thought i would show you around a little bit, so you can get a visual of my day. below is an aerial view of our apartment complex. the orange line to the east is Germantown Parkway which is a six (sometimes 8) lane giant of a road that has every restaurant, shop, church, store, school etc. you could ever imagine. i have circled the church that we went to this week. it's off of germantown. we absolutely loved it, and look how close it is to our apartment! the orange in the top corner is I-40, which is very convenient. notice the big white square building just southeast of I-40. that's bellevue baptist church. they have 20,000 people a sunday for worship. compare the size to the little orange dot that is our apartment building (containing 24 units) this church is ginormous! (our home is in the lower left corner... in case you didn't notice)

(you can click on any of the pictures to make them bigger...)


SO.. in the mornings, i take off with finley and we head north to Bartlett. I take her to daycare in the mornings and Crystal picks her up in the afternoons. you can follow the blue lines below to see my route. i drive 7.5 miles to drop off Finn, then drive about 16 miles in to school. traffic isn't too bad during rush hour. it is usually only slow if it rains. and when it rains here it rains huge, and it rains for days at a time. it's nothing at all like east TN where it might rain for half an hour. anyway, on the way home i take the interstate the whole way(that's the green route). from school it takes about 25 minutes to get home. 35 if rush hour traffic is bad. notice the mississippi river to the left of the picture.

The worst part about driving in to school on the interstate, or coming home on the interstate is the junction of I-40 at the I-240 loop. I-40 was originally supposed to go straight through the heart of downtown... but the zoo was in the way. right where i have written "health science" in the picture above, the road stops. so instead, they dumped I-40 onto the loop, and then back on it's own in time to cross the river. the stupid thing is that the only way to get from I-40 to I-240 is a one lane exit ramp (coming from both directions). that was just terrible terrible planning, and nothing has been done to change it. so everyday there is, without fail, a line a mile long (honestly) of cars and trucks going 10 miles an hour waiting to get off on the ramp. dumb.
this is an aerial view of my school. the orange line is I-40, and you can see the famous bridge across the mississippi. that park that my grandpa told me about (the one that those pictures a few posts ago were from) is in the lower left hand corner. the school is pretty much in the heart of downtown which is pretty cool, but can also be a little scary sometimes. below is a picture from google earth that shows my parking lot at school (it's circled in orange at the bottom) and you can see my main classroom (it's the circle in the middle of the page). I park and walk a quarter mile to class. not bad. the library and administration offices are about a half mile away.

there's a nice park across the street...
The library is right across the street from The Med (which is a huge hospital, it's also where Morgan Freeman was taken when he wrecked his car and needed arm and shoulder surgery). There are always a lot of people hanging around the front of the hospital which can be a little unnerving sometimes, but you get used to it. what you see in the picture below is just the front part of the hospital, there is a lot you can't see here. you can see the library to the left of the med (across the street). and beside the library is a huge hole in the ground where they are building the new $60 million pharmacy building. neat.
This is the view from my parking lot. it's not really as scary as it looks.

This is the view from where i like to sit in the library. this is the Med building again (you can see it labeled in the google earth photo above). you can see some of the people hanging around out front. if you look closely in the reflection you can see the trolley going up madison. it is reflected directly above that maroon van. you can see it better in the large view.

i think someone may have died upstairs. this is what the lights look like in the library.
old old old.





so that's about it. i drive a a lot (about an hour a day, and about 300 miles monday to friday) but i like it. and i am really liking school. but i do miss a lot of things about east tn.