It's been a pretty packed year and I cannot believe that it has gone so fast. Time certainly does fly. We sort of celebrated our one year anniversary by flying half way around the world for vacation, but thats a story for another post, if I ever get there.
This past year I have been reminded of how grateful I am for the technology that allows us to connect with friends and family from all over the place. I was hoping that I was mostly done navigating time zones and using the internet to catch up with my friends when we moved back to California, but I guess you can never really plan where life will take you.
We have had a lot of different experiences during our first year in Pennsylvania and learned many thing about seasons and snow and the East Coast and Pennsylvania. Here are 12 random things we've learned about living here to mark our first 12 months.
1.) Philadelphia is a really walkable city that is nice and grid like so it is easy to get around.
2.)Pennsylvania has the most waterways and lakes of any state in the continential USA. But the water doesn't taste as good as it does in Oakland.
3.)Pennsylvania drivers are really, really horrible.
4.)Spring shows up faster than you can blink. One day everything is bare and gray and the next there are flowers and leaves everywhere! Its beautiful.
5.)Many people call Pennsylvania Pennsyltucky, but this also means that there are lots of farms to get tasty local edibles and the countryside is amazing even in the winter.
6.)Apparently it's called "The Shore" and not "the beach" when you go to the beach.
7.)I market major holidays with appropriately shaped butter (lamb-Easter, turkey - Thanksgiving, tree-xmas)
8.)Outdoor pools are only open from Memorial Day to Labor day and heated by the summer heat. Cold summers = miserable pools.
9.)Wegman's is the bomb
10.)The summer is really, really humid and the winter is bone dry.
11.)There are a lot of good Italian restaurants in the area.
12.)Pennsylvania has no sales tax on clothes which makes a great place to go shopping. The outlets are only 20min away.
We're looking forward to whatever next year brings us!
