Friday, July 17, 2009

Peachtree Living

Paul here. This is my first post ever!

As implied by the title of the post, I am coming to you from the land of peach trees (and streets, neighborhoods, and cities named "peachtree"). The Ellison family has just gone southern. We have officially moved to the ATL (though I will NEVER convert to being a Braves fan).

For those of you who don't know (and that's probably everyone who reads the blog to keep up with our comings and goings), I have taken a job with Altea Therapeutics in Atlanta, GA and we have moved to Lilburn, a suburb about 45 minutes North East of downtown.

Some impressions of Atlanta:

Atlanta is HUGE...but not really
Coming from Salt Lake City, Utah (metro population of 1.1 million people), Atlanta (metro population of 5.3 million people) seemed like it would be quite overwelming. However with multiple freeways averaging 5 or 6 lanes and most people apparently traveling in the opposite direction as my commute, it doesn't feel any more crowded on the freeway than in Utah (other than the 1 mile road to the freeway that can take 30mins if I leave when the coke worldwide headquarters employees get off work).

There is no such thing as a "mature tree" in Utah.
The trees in our backyard here are about 50ft tall. And there are much taller trees all around. I look out the upper windows in our 2-story living room and still see trees going up and up. It's amazing.

Utah is quite green...in a brown sort of way.
This is something that I recalled when I first moved back to Utah from Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Here, freeways are lined by 50ft tall trees (and taller). Vines and bushes hang onto the freeway in sections. Everything is green. It helps that Atlanta gets more annual rainfall than Seattle does.

Atlanta must be the bug capital of the world. Seriously.
In the 4 weeks that we have been in Atlanta I have seen my first ever scorpion (in our bedroom), my first ever praying mantis (on my garbage can), the longest and densest trail of ants ever, fire flies (which I have seen in Washington DC at Lizzie's place), beetles are everywhere, spiders too. Tommy shrieks a lot when he finds HUGE spiders (they are about 1mm in diameter).

We are happy to be living among the peach trees.

2 comments:

sarawhat said...

watch out for the fire ants too!!! They's BRUTAL!! We've been to atlanta a few times and it's a pretty fun city. I think it would be a blast to live there and get to explore all of it's surroundings. Congrats on making there safely!

Jeff said...

The first scorpion I ever saw was in Brasil, in the bathroom sink when I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. I just went back to bed and hoped it would be gone by morning, which it was. Looking back this probably wasn't the smartest decision I ever made, but also not the dumbest one ever.