Detroit?

We are gearing up for our upcoming move to Detroit. (Jared will do his residency there so we will be there for the next 4 years.) I am not excited to move again - I feel like I am just starting to get settled here, but such is life. What can we do but make the best of it! At least I know that after this move I won't have to move for 4 years!! (That will definitely be a record). We went to Detroit this weekend to get a feel for the city. I had never been there and I haven't heard great things about it. So in order to get a better feel for which suburbs we would like to start looking for a place to live we decided to make a quick trip there. (Although we can buy a house downtown for five hundred dollars we decided our safety is probably more important than being able to pay cash for our home.)

I have never felt so self conscious about my car then I did while I was driving around Detroit, and this coming from a girl who drove a raper truck in high school. See exhibit A:

I'm not sure the picture does it justice... it really was a hideous little pick up truck.

I think the entire time that we were there we only saw like 20 foreign cars... they were all American made!! Really?!? I didn't know people still bought American made cars... jk. It was interesting to see so many American cars. I guess it's because the economy of the area is built up around the American car industry, it only makes sense that people would want to support it. Jared said he felt like people were glaring at us in our Toyota Sienna. When someone wouldn't let him into a lane he commented, "it's probably because I'm driving a foreign car!" Perhaps if the economy were different we wouldn't have been so self conscious but pretty much I felt like I was driving around with a big banner on the side of my car that said, "I don't give a darn about you and your failing industry." I imagine it will only be worse when we move there and have to put Michigan plates on our Toyota! Looks like we might have to buy a new car...

We also decided to contact our realtor to see if he would be willing to show us a few homes that we had found online. There are quite a few foreclosures in Detroit so we thought we would take a gander at a few to see if this is something we would be interested in. Jared's pretty handy so we thought maybe we could fix something up... Two words: Absolutely Not!! The houses we saw were sooo nasty... rotting roofs, mold, animal urine, human feces... I can't even describe how awful these houses were, and the smell that eeked from them was something fierce! When we got to the 4th house Gage turns to Jared with his nose plugged, "Daddy, is this one going to stink?" Well at least now we know. Foreclosures aside, Detroit isn't as bad as it is made out to be. But then again we spent the majority of our time in the suburbs, pretty far from Detroit proper.