Our house! aka the ghetto!

Some people may think I'm exaggerating the ghetto-ness of our place. They might think that since I've never lived in the city I can't really tell which is just normal city dwelling and which area is the actual ghetto. Well friends, I can assure you I live in the real deal. Tomorrow I'll post some links of descriptions about my area, until then, just know that my neighborhood is named Middle East. Granted, it's because it's located on the east side of the city, and why yes, it is centrally located in the east side, but still. The name makes me giggle.

To the pictures!

Here's a shot I took from the street in front

Our house is the lovely one in the middle. (the black door) Our closest is neighbor lives in the white house. There's a few more empty houses until the next one.

As you can see in this shot

Except for maybe one or two of them, all the cars you see are owned by Johns Hopkins employees or visitors. There's a two hour limit on our street and the parking lady is VERY serious about that. Around 5 or 5:30 all the cars clear out and the streets are pretty much deserted.

Looking out from our front door gives us this wonderful view of a beautiful empty lot. Bonus: it has Yeoman's car on it! (To avoid the scary parking lady, we have to park in the lot so we don't get a ticket for parking on the street. We don't have a resident parking pass yet)

If there is one thing I love, it's empty lots. Thankfully, there's another one right beside us! *whew*

The colorful building in the background is part of Johns Hopkins. They're our next door neighbor basically.  There's been a recent outcry about the amount of employee and visitor's cars that have been broken into, so JHU has really stepped up the amount of patrols. Yay for us! What's really funny is watching the security? police? guys roll down the street in full SWAT-looking gear on their urban "tactical" segways with fat, off-road tires. Yes. Segways. I feel safer already. 

This is our prime parking spot. They put the wooden fence up for the dogs. It's illegal for dogs to be tethered so you see tons and tons of fences like this one. Most of them are chain link, but we're fancy y'know.

Why yes, that is a tree growing in the house beside us. What's your point?

To get from the car to the house, you have to go around because the rental place doesn't have a key to the back door. (Let that sink in for a minute. I'll wait.) It's not a big deal though, you just go through the lot which leads right to the front door. It even has a nice little concrete step someone made! (or a concrete block someone forgot to move. whatever)

This is just a very short introduction to our place in Baltimore. I have tons and tons of pictures from our 3 week adventure of living here that will slowly be posted on this. It's going to take some time catching up, but eventually I'll get around to posting everything I wanted to.