While I haven't gotten any creepy phone calls about one week deadlines, I'm officially 7 days out from the beginning of my next adventure: living in The Big Apple. Hopefully that unpleasant little girl from The Ring won't show up next week and crawl out of my television to do horribly terrible things like frighten me to death or leave the bathroom light on all the time.

I had been spending the odd hour here and there over the last month doing research on housing in NYC and everything that goes along with it, and there was a lot to learn. Then, two weeks ago, I confirmed my branch placement at Harlem West with Success Academy and that allowed me to finally get started on my housing search in earnest.

And boy was that fun.

I spent entire days in front of the computer drafting emails (nearly 30 by my count) and crawling all over the internet hunting for a place to live. I got mostly nothing in return, but over the course of a week I eventually managed to lock in 4 possibilities: 2 in Manhattan and 2 in Queens. I thought that was a pretty good ratio because the usual vacancy rate in the city is a whopping 1%. Thankfully, I only had to talk to one mildly crazy renter who told me all about her terrible past roommates, her amazing cat, and her colonic regimen, which struck her place off the list.

So, last week I went back to the City and hoofed it all around town checking out apartments (note: things are much farther from each other than they appear on Google Maps). The first place I saw was in Hamilton Heights and though it was nice 3 roommates was a few too many for me. I had 4 (yes 4!) when I was a freshman at UNH. Never again.

I saw my top choice next and it was a beautiful place in Central Park North/West Harlem with two roommates and a five minute walk to work. But, they must have decided my awesome was too much for them and the next day they pulled in someone else. However that was okay by me because it was at the very top of my price range ($1150 a month for a room) and after I saw that place I trekked out to Astoria in Queens, which reminded me of arriving in Taichung all those years ago: it felt like home.

And next week it will be: 36th Street, right near Astoria Boulevard. One roommate, good price, and a furnished room.

Exciting!

Now I just need to take the first week of February to settle in and test out my commute, because the real fun starts on February 9th when I begin training for Success. I expect to be working somewhere in the range of 55-60 hours a week, plus course work for my master's, and my levels of trepidation continue to rise. But, we'll see how all that goes when it happens. As a character from one of my favorite books once said, "We'll eat that horse when we get to it."

Of course I also plan to do a lot of exploring in the area around my new place. I've already done quite a bit of research on the Internet and there are so many restaurants/cafes/pubs and the like that I can't wait to check out. There's also a beer place to the north called Singlecut and they specialize in hoppy beers. Swoon.

At the end here I'll add that if anyone is about to get into the joyous slog that comprises apartment hunting in New York, I found Padmapper to be an excellent resource. It mostly pulls ads from Craigslist, but what I love about it is that you can overlay public transportation and neighborhood names, hide markers for apartments you aren't interested in, and save the location of the ones you've contacted. A lot of the time on Craigslist I'd find promising leads in areas that interested me only to find out that I'd emailed them already. I actually locked in my by using the Listings Project, which you can read more about here.

Anyway, cheers for stopping by. I need to run to the store because apparently we're in for "a crippling, possibly historic" winter storm. Hooray!