If you’ve talked to me within the last year, there’s a really good chance (we’re talking like a 95% chance here) you’ve heard me endlessly talk about wanting to move to Chicago. I’ve been searching apartments, talking about Chicago, following social media pages of places in Chicago, the list goes on and on.
And now, here I am, sitting at my desk in my Lincoln Park apartment, writing this. Holy WOW.
It’s now been a week; a week since packing up my life with my boyfriend in Tampa, saying our goodbyes, driving 17+ hours in a U-Haul truck and settling in to our new apartment that we had only seen via a FaceTime call with the leasing agent.
Driving up in the U-Haul, as soon as the city appeared in the distance, I was literally shaking. I turned to Chris in the passenger seat and said, “Now what?”
Rooftop deck view from our apartment building (18th floor)
Now what, indeed. We’ve just been exploring our new neighborhood, finding cool coffee shops, restaurants, bars, nightlife. Keeping our jobs and transitioning to working remotely has been instrumental to this move, although I am starting to search for work as a Graphic Designer as I am approaching my graduation date at the end of November. My plan since moving back to Tampa from Orlando, and leaving UCF where I was studying Journalism, in 2016 was to enroll in school again but pursue Graphic Design, and work at CENTURY 21 Beggins Enterprises while I was in school, and then move once I graduated. With the possibility of working remotely, though, I didn’t want to wait any longer, so here we are, living in Chicago with so many possibilites.
I have been missing concert photography, and photography in general, a lot — so one of my goals was to get back into it and start back up Sounds to Sight, my concert photography blog, and because Chicago has a great music scene. I’ve kept track of concerts coming to town (thanks Bandsintown) and I sent out a couple press emails; this morning I received confirmation to shoot my first show this week.
We plan on just taking it day by day, figuring things out as we go. We spent our first week here exploring and figuring out where we are. We wandered around the Lincoln Park Conservatory and the Lincoln Park Zoo, which is just around the corner from us. We’ve walked all around, to various happy hours and restaurants, figured out where local groceries are and staples like Target and Walgreens. We took the bus into Downtown yesterday for brunch and we plan on figuring out the public transportation as we don’t have a car with us, so we’ll be relying on it.
