Seven Days...

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!

Bonus points of you get this reference.

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!

I GOT A JOB.

Hey guys, it's getting horribly cold here in America and we've already had out first snowfall of the year, but all is not gray and grim. As you may have surmised from the title of this blog entry:

I got a job!

I guess my interview at Success Academy Charter went as well as I thought it did because I got a call a few days after the fact and they offered me a position as an Assistant Teacher. Pretty swell. Especially because I'll be doing online and summer course work through Touro College over an 18 month period and then I'll have my master's in education. All paid for by Success.

While having a shot and New York City and no student debt for my master's degree was a pretty damn good deal, I still mulled it over during the Thanksgiving holiday because I wanted some feedback and different perspectives from friends and family.

I also hate making decisions.

Cheers to you guys who took the time to read over the stuff I sent out and send me your thoughts on it, it helped a lot. When I sat down with my old man and talked about it his take on it was the same as everyone else's: Do it.

So, I am.

I called them back on Monday (12/1) and accepted the job. February ninth is my official start date, and I'll have to arrive a few weeks before then to square away a few things for the school. So, I've got some time to obsess and worry and over-think everything in the mean time. However, I'm also super excited to get back into the classroom and really start to buckle down on my forward progression as an educator; not to mention the fact that I'll be in The Big Apple for a couple years, so I can explore it and get into all kinds of adventures, new hobbies, and other stuff to write about on here. Score!

Anndd this is where I ask for your help. If you've got friends and family in the NYC area, please do me a favor and ask if they need a little more Handsome in their lives (with a capital "H"). I'm not sure what part of the city I'll be based in yet because over the next few weeks I'll be doing follow up interviews and Skype calls with principles and lead teachers at various branches of Success to see which school might be a good fit for me. Off the top of my head I could land in the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Manhattan. That means that for the next two months or so I'll be looking to find a place to live. However, if I have a really hard time (which I probably will) I might need a spare room or even a couch to sack out on for a little while until I can get my feet under me and snag a room, apartment, or a particularly classy cardboard hovel. Feel free to toss me messages on Facebook or through my contact page which is here. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated and rewarded with good karma and possibly home brewed beer. Now to close out this entry, here's a happy little spaceman. Cheers!

Back to the Big Apple

I'm two weeks into my new American adventure and so far I'd say I'm well over the jet lag hump but still slogging through my reverse culture shock. I borrowed my dad's car and drove up to NH the other day to see Mumma Weiss and that was really weird. I didn't get my driver's license until I was 24 and ready to leave for Taiwan so I'm not what you'd call an experienced driver, however getting a few thousand hours in on my Hartford has made my hyper aware and paranoid on the road. I'd almost forgotten that people here follow the rules.

But, the real idea behind this post is that I  went to New York City for a job interview on Tuesday. It was for a position at a charter school called Success Academy, the main office of which was in the financial district about a five minute walk from Wall Street and the NY stock exchange. 

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There were five other interviewees that showed up and I think I was the oldest by at least five or six years; most of them were talking about majors, school, and graduation and such. I remember what that was like, except in my day we graduated in the snow. Uphill. Anyway, we had all applied to be a Teaching Fellow for the winter or summer cohort. This consists of working as an assistant teacher and gradually taking on more responsibility to becoming a lead teacher while also doing coursework through Touro College towards a master's degree and New York certification.

At first we got the spiel about the school's history and mission and whatnot, which was nothing that we probably didn't know already from our pre-interview research. A few videos of current teachers followed to show different subjects and teaching styles and we had to analyze and discuss them. Then we got handed a nine line poem called Keepsake, which I knew about from looking up Success on Glassdoor and despite all of my best efforts before the interview I simply couldn't find it online. Julia (Julie? Julez? If you read this I'm sorry I forgot your name!), one of the four recruitment coordinators in the room took us through the poem as a Success instructor would, using "inquiry based instruction". She asked us a lot of questions, basically, and had our brains do all the heavy lifting. It was great to watch her work us through it and I couldn't help but think: I've seen some great teachers in Taiwan, but this...this here is the real McCoy.

Then the real fun began.

We had 10 minutes to plan for a 3 minute teach back (demo) on the poem, focusing primarily on  investigating and conveying the literal plot of the story and finishing right where we would start to delve into the deeper meaning behind the words. I remember thinking before the interview: Pssh, a 3 minute demo? Hah. That'll be a piece of cake.

Nope.

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I haven't felt genuinely nervous when teaching in a very long time and it was, on some level, refreshing. I did like the way that the teach back was structured in that each person would do their teach back and immediately reflect on what went well and what sucked before receiving feedback. Then each consecutive person would have to incorporate each previous person's feedback from the recruiters into their demo. That is, the sixth person had 5 other people worth of notes to work into their demo, on the fly.

I volunteered to go first.

We did well overall, and I was happy to be the guinea pig by going first. But, we then had to take some of the feedback we heard for someone else or that we got directly and state that was what we were going to work on and then prep for 5 minutes before doing a 1 minute teach back. Whew. 

Two writing prompts and a fifteen-minute one-on-one interview about my teaching and managing background were next and then, finally, I was done. 

This whole process had taken about three hours total and I hadn't had lunch, so I decided to swing by Katz's Delicatessen before I headed into Chinatown to wait for my return bus to Boston. Katz's is the place where Meg Ryan famously faked an orgasm in When Harry Met Sally. Let me tell you, the pastrami on Rye at Katz's is so fucking good I'm not so sure that Meg was kidding around.

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                           Fully three incredible inches of pastrami (that's what she said?).

Traffic over the Manhattan bridge on Wednesday night was pretty much a glorified parking lot and it took nearly five hours to get back to Boston. At least the interview went well and my hotel's proximity to Chinatown helped me score some beef on rice for lunch on Tuesday.

I think tonight I'll finish up this post and then spend some time reading up on other jobs in NYC and Boston and maybe watch a movie. Tomorrow I'm off to Albany see a chum from high school I haven't seen in ages and has graciously volunteered to take me on a brewery tour of the capital.

See you later, chumps.

America...Day 1

Two planes, several movies, a little napping, and something like 19 hours brought me from Taiwan and back here to the states. Overall my flights were uneventful, but the first leg to San Francisco was a bit bumpy and shaking airplanes give me the willies. Mostly I passed the time with movies and thankfully United had a decent selection to choose from. Though I would advise that you avoid the new versions of the Planet of the Apes franchise. Yeesh.

             Poppa Weiss' House.

Saturday was my first day back in the US not just as a returning expat on vacation for a bit, but being here for real. So far, it was pretty weird to be back but I think we were all expecting me to say that. Six years is quite a long time to be away from your home country and I'm not looking forward to the coming feelings of displacement and culture shock.. I'd say I'm already neck deep at times. Strange to feel like I don't belong here, or that I'm not really here, or something! I guess my brain is still catching up to the fact that the rest of my body has relocated across the world for good and that, no, I can't go get a dan bing across the street and go to the pool later.

By the way it's 10 degrees (C) during the day. It was 26 when I left Taiwan. Sigh.

I got a few hours sleep Friday night and spent most of Saturday changing mailing addresses online and what not and trying not to freak out. I did get out of the house for a little while when I walked the mile up the street to downtown West Newbury, which consists of a pizza place across the road from a convenience store. Super cosmopolitan. Obviously I enjoyed stuffing my face with large steak bomb and washing it down with a local draft beer and it was actually a nice day for a walk.

I've also gotten a few episodes deep into Peaky Blinders, an English show about a gang in Birmingham in the early 1900's. If you're wondering about the name it comes from the fact that these guys, who were a real gang, put razors in their caps to assist them in slashing up their enemies. Nice guys. I figure I'll stick to watching things on the computer for now, I'm not sure I'm reading to get into the American TV advertising deluge just yet.

I've micro-napped several times while writing this, so I'm going to give myself another 20 minutes or so and then get some sack time. I hope you are well, Taiwan friends. Enjoy your warm weather you lucky bastards.

Buy the ticket, take the ride

It is with a strange mix of excitement and terror that I write this entry on this beautifully mild and breezy Sunday evening. Today I made the most important purchase of my recent past and foreseeable future: I bought my one-way ticket back home. My Taiwan adventure is coming to an end on November 7 at 1pm.

I'm outta here.

That, my friends, is quite an overwhelming thing to finally say officially. It's been something on the horizon for nearly a year at this point, and more recently I've had my eye on a particular ticket. But, now that I've actually bought it...that's pretty cool/weird/scary/awesome. So you better pencil some Nik-time into your schedules because my time is limited now (though still affordable if you bring me snacks). There will definitely be a much, much longer blog entry about all this some point in the near-ish future as the last six years of my life have been, by far, the very best of my three decades on this pale, blue dot.

For now, I'm going to go for a drive across the city and try my best not to freak out.