Yes, yesterday we signed the contract to rent a “Garden Apartment”. It’s the bottom floor in the brown building on the right in this photo (thanks to Google Maps), under the stairs where the little “A” is:
We have the “garden apartment”, which means we have the uncommon luxury of having a small backyard. We are very thankful to have finally found a place more or less in our price range. It’s only a 25-30 minute subway commute to work for Ben (similar to church), near some parks and a mall, about a 15 minute walk to the library, museum and Prospect Park. God is good.
Garden apartments can be interesting because they’re halfway underground at the front, so your window is at ground level on the outside! Ben is hoping to take the day off on Thursday the 1st and then we’ll move, buy some basic furniture and clean the apartment.
In other news, we have realised that we are officially insane. Ben drove around Manhattan today (and Brooklyn and part of New Jersey). First in Brooklyn to pick up a car seat and bed we bought at a stoop sale some weekends ago but had no way to transport, then to the URC in Manhattan we hope to attend from now on that we went to two weeks ago. After that we headed on over to New Jersey to a barbeque hosted by one the Oyster directors, Ariel.
So the question in all your minds is: Did you buy a car?! The answer is NO way! We are now members of Zipcar. Basic principle is that you rent a car by the hour or day. So we got some driving experience — Ben driving and me navigating. Ben did so well driving! He didn’t go up any one way streets the wrong way, he didn’t drive on the left side of the road and he only got honked at once and that in New York says a lot! But yes, we got lost (remember who was navigating). We knew we should have bought a GPS … but we arrived at the right place in the end. :-) We’re very glad to have the use of a service like this, but are thankful for public transport — we wouldn’t want to drive everyday. We were surprised at the bad condition many of the roads were in — lots of pot holes and patched-up bits of road. I guess it’s hard to do road work here with so much traffic all the time.
Anyway, more about our new apartment after we move in!