The last week of our lives.

Our friend Brandie took us to the airport at the crack of dawn and we caught and 8:30 am flight to JFK. So we arrived 5 hours later on Tuesday, July 25th at about 4:30pm , with 1 suitcase, 1 backpack, 1 aerobed, 1 dufflebag, and 1 laptop. I will never forget because we carried these items for several hours on the New York Airtrain, the NYC subways, and onto a train to New Haven, Connecticut. So we spent another 4+ hours on the trains to get to New Haven.

Sidenote: Running with large bags to a full train is never a good idea, especially if there's another empty train 15 minutes later. I think I really freaked out a couple people when I was stowing our large baggage items directly over them in a very unbalanced fashion. By this point, we were both VERY tired (from our 3 hours sleep the previous night)

It all worked out in the end, we arrived safely with our good friends Maureen and Jeremy Bennett. We slept 12+ hours that night and the next day we got to check out some of Yale’s campus and see the small town of New Haven. Unfortunately, New Haven, CT is almost a two-hour train ride which costs about $13-18 pp one-way. This was not the ideal situation for finding a place to live, but a miracle happened in that my cousins, Liesl & Todd were out of town in Michigan and had an empty apartment which they offered us to stay which was located in the East Village of Manhattan (much closer to Brooklyn).

After apartment hunting via subway for 4 days, we finally found a great place Prospect Leffert Gardens area. We’re definitely the only white folks on the block as it is a very African American neighborhood and we’re on the second floor in a bi-level brownstone apartment (kinda like the Cosby Show). It’s a two bedroom apartment with the second bedroom more the size of an office but overall the apartment is a good size at 1000 sq ft. It is very close to Prospect Park which was designed by Frank Law Olmsted who in addition to designing Central Park has also done many of the Seattle area parks (Volunteer, Arboretum, Green Lake, etc.) We’re also one block away from a Wendy’s which was designed by Dave Thomas also known as “America’s Favorite Hamburger Cook”. We’re one block away from the 2/5 subway and 3 blocks away from the Q/N subway.

Megan’s school Brooklyn College is approximately 2.3 miles south of where we live and I will probably be working about 6.7 miles northwest of where we live.

So now we’re in this weird place of it being insanely hot (over 100ºF) me not having a job, Megan not being in school, and us not having anything but one-week’s worth of clothes (Our Door-to-door storage container won’t arrive until August 14^th). We’ve been staying at Liesl and Todd’s even though we have an apartment only because they have a wonderful cat Parker, furniture, and air-conditioning (although there have been threats of blackout and suggestions to turn-off extraneous appliances and fill your bathtubs with water).

We’ve seen about a dozen rats and I decided to start calling them Roger and Rita (the Rat). The funniest moment of my week was when Megan and I were walking in the Upper East side to look at getting some furniture and we walked by this rat which was checking out a pile of garbage on the side of the road. Well, when Megan walked by, it freaked out the rat and it ran the same direction we were walking and Megan almost stepped on it’s head but instead did a little skip-shuffle jump to avoid it. I think you had to be there.

Long story short, we’re waiting to get our junk and get settled. We have a place to live. We need some furniture and a bed. We’re liking the exploring.