"Mall, Sweet Mall"

Dear Reader,

The Merrill family has finally moved into a “permanent” residence. That’s right, y’all. After kickin’ it for a month in a hotel, we’re now occupying an apartment on the 24^th floor of Bayview Tower.

In case you don’t already know, staying for one month in a hotel is like eating an extra-large pizza by yourself. Sure, the first slice is delicious……..But by the end of that thing, you never want to see a piece of pizza again.  You get the idea.

(Truth is, I don’t really have any room to complain. There are people I’ve talked to here that lived in a hotel room for more than 4 months. I don’t know how they did it…)

What’s really important is that we HAVE AN APARTMENT. It’s wonderful to have a place that is “yours”. I honestly don’t care that my bedroom has zero furniture and that the only thing between the cold tile floor and me is a rock-hard mat. I’m just flipping happy that I even have my own bedroom. There’s a lot to love about our new home, and some of it is almost unbelievable.

Bayview tower is literally on top of a mall and a supermarket. I’ll repeat that. Just so that it sinks in.

Bayview tower is literally on top of a mall AND a supermarket.

So, whenever we need to go to the supermarket, we take an elevator and BOOM. We’re there.  To illustrate just how little time it takes, I decided to use my watch’s stopwatch function to time a one-way trip. From the front door of 2401 to the automatic door of the supermarket took me a full 2 minutes and 3 seconds. I kid you not, reader. 2 minutes, 3 seconds.

Get this….After you get your groceries at the store, you can roll your shopping cart into the elevator, up to your floor, and into your apartment. Once you’re done unloading, all you have to do is take the cart back to the supermarket. Do you remember the time I said before? Yeah….I got that time when I was returning two shopping carts.

I wasn’t joking when I said that this stuff is almost unbelievable.

And now, I’ll talk about the mall. The mall that we live above is called “Abu Dhabi Mall” (…I’m not sure where they got that name, but that’s beside the point.) In my opinion, Abu Dhabi Mall is really nice. It’s a 3-story mall with a variety of stores. Now, I’m not really into malls and shopping, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll be down in that mall more than a few times getting an ice cream cone at Baskin Robbins. Or maybe I’ll go down there to get an ice cream cone at Baskin Robbins. Who knows! I might even go to the mall to get ice cre- NO.

It’s going to be very difficult for me to practice temperance here. And I hope that the convenience of living 2 minutes and 3 seconds from the supermarket doesn’t spoil me.

The apartment itself is VERY nice, and it has a great view of the bay. Hence, “Bayview Tower”. The entire floor of the apartment is tile, and only my parents’ bedroom has furniture, so the whole place echoes a lot. A lot. A lot. A lot. A lot.  If you're interested in looking at a few photos of our place, sorry, but I'll upload them later. 

The sun went down long ago, so I guess that it’s time for me to wrap this blog post up and go to bed. I mean rock-hard mat. Thank you for reading, reader.

Rock on. NM