Update from the EaStsYdE
Hey everyone. So I'm here and am finally, FINALLY unpacked. It took almost two weeks to clean, disinfect, de-roach, de-ant, and basically scrub from floor to ceiling in our apartment, but now it's done and (almost) everything is unpacked. The only thing left now is to clear off my desk and do some homework before next week (woohoo). The apartment was really disappointing at first, we drove into our one-block dead end street which as you can see from my subject line, is only five blocks from the Projects here in Jersey City. So we drive onto the block and everyone is sitting on their stoops staring at us. There is a non-descript bag of puke strewn in the middle of the road, rap blasting from shitty speakers so loud that from outside we can barely hear each other. The rap music blends with the latin hip-hop playing from a different house while people sit outside and listen to it and stare. We are the only white people on the block, possibly for a multi-block radius, and people warn us when we walk by that we should stay out of this neighborhood. We start to say that we live here, but they just shake their heads and tell us not to go west of Delaware-which is our street. So yeah, the street wasn't exactly the best introduction to our new home. So we get to the fourth floor of our building (dodging a pitbull and some other scary looking dog whose owners ocassionally leave their doors open to the stairwell thus allowing the mean dogs to run free) and walk into our new home to discover that despite the new European parquet floors in the pictures we saw on Craigslist, the place is basically a shithole. But we had already paid a $1400 security deposit and August rent, so there was no turning back.

So now, after almost two weeks of sweating non-stop because we have one a/c and a long apartment that doesn't really allow air to move from one room to another. Oh yeah, and did I mention that New Jersey and New York were in the middle of a freak heat wave (95-100 degrees every day with 95% humidity) that resulted in a fucking TORNADO touching down in Brooklyn a few days ago!?! Today is the first cool day we've had and it feels fucking great.

The apartment actually looks really really nice and there hasn't been any sort of bug to be seen for over a week. The gas stove really isn't that hard to deal with, and our brand new Queen size pillowtop mattress is proving its worth. Hey at least we can be sweaty and miserable and sleep well!

I start school on Wednesday and I'm getting excited. I've been into NYC a few times over the last couple of weeks and it's such a cool fucking city.. So nanner nanner. All I can tell myself at this point is that we signed a year lease and if the place is unbearable by then we'll at least know where NOT to live in the area. But you know, as much as I bitch, the location is soooo close to the train and our neighbors, despite being kind of scary, have all started to get used to us and actually wave from their stoops when they see us (as we had done to no avail- and feeling retarded as we pasted these big scared smiles over our faces as we wave to the thugs and feel really really white). But yeah. My life just got a whole lot more interesting, to say the least.