Vic's First Days at Work & Apartment Hunting

Well we've made it halfway through our first week. Victor is really enjoying work so far. On his first day, he had orientation at 9am with a few other new Expedia employees and mostly just got his email and stuff set up. The Mobiata design team took him out for lunch at yet another French restaurant where he ordered the same ham sandwich type thing he ordered the last time they took him to a French restaurant because he can't read the menu, and I wonder why they like French restaurants so much. The team also went out for coffee twice during the day. It seems like they like to take a lot of breaks.

Downtown close to Victor's office

The last few days, Victor has been going into the office at 10:20ish. Most people at Mobiata go in around 10:30 or 11 and stay until about 6:30, but there are no set hours. As long as you get your work done, people don't care what time you come in or what time you leave. Apparently one guy comes in around 11 and leaves at 4, and nobody cares. So that will take some getting used to because Victor definitely prefers having more set hours and someone telling him what times are appropriate to come in and leave, but once he gets used to it I think it will be really awesome to have such flexibility. So for the first couple weeks, he's going to follow the schedule of everyone else and go in around 10 and leave around 6. But after that, I think he's going to go in much earlier and leave earlier because we just like that lifestyle better. This week we've been waking up at 7:30 or so and just have to kill 2 1/2 hours before he goes into work, and then we stay up super late at night. It's just a very strange schedule for us.

The shuttle that takes Vic to work

Other benefits of the job include free breakfast and unlimited snacks, which, of course, Victor is extremely excited about. They have oatmeal and cereal and all kinds of fruit and Doritos and candy bars and protein bars and beer on tap (which Victor asked about, and apparently people really do drink it at work).
We also got our first Clipper card from the company which is the card that you use to ride the BART, so we have 10 rides for the rest of this month and unlimited rides for September. After that, all months will just have $120 worth, I think. Someone just messed up for September and accidentally got him unlimited or something. I'm not sure. I'm a little confused about it.

But Victor is really enjoying the people he works with. They're so nice. Everyone is giving him advice about where to live. One of his coworkers, who is a San Francisco native, even made him a map of the neighborhoods and pointed out which ones were safest, closest to train lines, etc. They've just been extremely helpful and welcoming.
The project Victor has been assigned at work is the Expedia app for Android. So he'll be designing the whole thing. He's pretty excited about it.
In other news, we found a new grocery store that's so much cheaper! Praise Jesus, because I was about to have a heart attack. The grocery store is about 1 1/2 miles from us so we made a 9pm trip with the rental car (because driving in San Francisco is actually not scary at all if it's not during rush hour). It's a more warehouse-y kind of grocery store, and it's still a little more expensive than we're used to, but nothing like Safeway. It's a bit ghetto, but we're so not above that.
Other than that, we haven't done a whole lot in the evenings. We've walked down by the water and the bridge some. We explored our little village complex and found the gyms and the little deli, and, holy cow, if we thought Safeway was expensive! This little deli is outrageous. Fifteen dollars for a jar of spaghetti sauce....needless to say, we'll never be buying anything from there.

Bay Bridge all lit up at night

We got in touch with the rental agent person that Expedia set us up with to help us find apartments. She'll be taking us around some neighborhoods we're interested in on Sunday and promised to show us 6-8 apartments within our budget, so we're really hoping this will help us get a feel for what we're looking for. I've emailed/called/texted a few other listings we've seen on Craigslist or other, and only one person has contacted me about a condo in the East Bay. We'll go see that one tonight. (People at work have also told him that he can leave at any time during the day to look at apartments if he needs to because they understand how hard it is to find an apartment).
Today Victor only has to work for an hour or two because there's some big Expedia meeting, and Mobiata people will be flying up to Washington. We're not exactly sure, but I guess there just won't be much work to do today so he'll hopefully be home soon, and we're going to explore some more.

Days 3,4 & 5=big success for Victor. I'm lagging a little bit because I can't figure out how to navigate around our neighborhood because all the roads are diagonal. I tried to walk up north and accidentally made a giant loop back to our apartment. But hopefully I'll catch up soon.

Also a giant, terrifying pelican