Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Apartment set!

We have a place to live! We had gotten an "acceptance" from the hospital housing people about a month ago, but hadn't received our assignment or really had much information from them. Well, we officially got our assignment today! It should be a fully renovated 3BR with redone hardwood floors, kitchen, and bathroom in an elevator building with laundry in the basement. Conveniently enough, T's daycare looks like it'll be on the floor above our apartment in the same building and one of our dear friends actually works on the first floor of this building!! We'll only be a couple blocks from the hospital, subway, A's preschool, Chipotle, a diner that we like... all the important things, right? ;) 

Actually, the one thing it's not especially close to is S's hospital which is south by almost exactly 100 blocks and across pretty much the entire width of the island. Fortunately, the island isn't that wide. Unfortunately, going "crosstown" as they call it is kind of painful in NYC. Before going into what going crosstown entails, I have to say that I love the public transportation system in NYC. For ~$100/month, you can get pretty much anywhere and everywhere in Manhattan, as well as much of the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn relatively efficiently. For such a complicated, busy city, I think it's a pretty amazing feat... especially compared to other public transportation systems which are much more expensive and, in my opinion, much less functional (although cleaner *ahem*). 

However, that 2 mile distance across the island through Central Park? Painful. There's no subway to take you so you have to take a crosstown bus. There are only a few places you can cross Central Park so, of course, they tend to get pretty trafficky and suddenly it takes forever for the bus to travel a measly distance. It also doesn't help that the bus stops at almost every intersection and lets people on and off. So we'll see how S's commute goes. Hopefully smoother than I'm picturing in my head...