Week 1 (Monday 24th April – Friday 28th April)
Never did I think it was possible to travel for 24 hours straight and land fresher than when we left, but that’s what happened after waking up at 4am to leave Melbourne on Monday 24th April, travel for 24 hours and then arrive in NYC on Monday 24th April. After receiving a business class upgrade for the entire journey (amazing!) we touched down ready to go.
Tuesday saw us walk 20km all over NYC, inspecting 8 apartments, climbing 95 flights of stairs, but no luck. We saw the tiniest of tiny apartments, in terrible condition, dull, dark, some without windows, some with windows looking straight onto brick walls. Checking out NYC for the first time was pretty cool – everyone seemed fairly happy and healthy…
The subway here is a different kind of beast in itself. It’s deafening loud, cold and wet. It’s especially miserable when you get yelled at by a subway employer (with attitude) for simply asking if you’re going in the right direction. There was a moment on the subway, when the train came screaming across the corner and it hit me that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. With the move happening so quickly, I really hadn’t had a chance to stop and think about what was actually happening. My eyes started to well up… but then the train arrived and we were on the way to view the next apartment.
We were travelling from the Upper East Side to the Upper West Side for our next apartment inspection. It had been raining all day, but now it had really started to come on. Unfortunately, when we arrived to the apartment, there was no shelter to stand under and the agent had stood us up. So we waited 30 minutes in torrential rain. Our winter coats by this time had soaked through, our socks, jeans and shoes were all sopping wet. Miserably, we made our way back to the subway to Brooklyn. We stopped into a cafe at the corner of our street for dinner. It had great reviews on Yelp and we were famished. After ordering a burger and a glass of wine, we were happy to be inside somewhere that was warm – we started to defrost. We inhaled the burgers and got the cheque – and were quite surprised that we had managed to spend $100 on x2 burgers and 2 glasses of wine. They weren’t even good burgers.
Wednesday was much of the same, running around Manhattan, viewing 11 apartments with no such luck. Wednesday night we popped into Times Square (which was quiet?) and the M&M store (my kryptonite). We then hopped into Havana Central for some cocktails, live Latin music and dinner. The cocktails were great – we were having such a great time – until the bill arrived. Another $100 for a very basic, simple (and unbalanced) dinner.
Thursday we got lucky, viewing an apartment on the Upper West Side at 1:15pm and signing it at 1:30pm. It will be ours, as long as we can pay for it. Setting up bank accounts have been harder than expected – even the bank staff are surprised at how hard it’s become. They’ve told us that since the election, there’s so many more hoops international people need to jump through when applying to setup an account. 3 days and approx 8 hours later, we setup a bank account at the very last hour. Now to wire the money from Aus – to USA – hopefully it arrives by Wednesday.
Overall everything seems to be falling into place pretty well! Fingers crossed for week two! 🙂
