Apartment Search
This past week I played hooky from Caltech. I skipped an entire week of classes and flew to the east coast for two major events: my boyfriend’s graduation from his university, and our new apartment search in New York!
I flew out on a Tuesday night and we took a train from Philadelphia to NYC the next morning. We checked into our Airbnb apartment early Wednesday afternoon and explored the Brooklyn neighborhood we were staying in. Around 3pm, we met up with a realtor to search our favorite neighborhood for apartments. And we found one on the first day!
I was shocked that we found a place so quickly. We are both worked fairly close together, so we knew the general radius of neighborhoods around our workplaces that we wanted to live in, in order to keep our commutes as short as possible. I also wanted to be near a park so that it would be easy to run before work, so that helped us narrow down our neighborhood search to one or two. We found a place in the first group of seven apartments we saw, and we got our application in the first day. Since we found an apartment on the first day, we spent the next two days of our trip to NYC doing more fun things! We were able to go to the Biennial at the Whitney Museum of Art, and try a few amazing restaurants (and bakeries, of course).
The realtor and the building’s broker worked very quickly, so we were able to sign a lease before we left the city. We took a train back to Philadelphia on Friday afternoon, just in time for my boyfriend to graduate from college!
His school was so big, he had two ceremonies. The first day, his school (the school of engineering) had a ceremony in which all the students walked and had their names announced. On the second day, about 3000 students across all schools in the university participated in a procession, and then the commencement speaker and several members of the university administration gave speeches.
Going home to Philadelphia for a few days also meant that I was home for Mother’s Day! This hasn’t happened for the past three years, so I felt very lucky. My mother and I, true to form, baked a cake together (from the cookbook of one of the former contestants from the Great British Bake Off, of course).
Also serendipitous timing: I was home the following Tuesday morning, before my flight back to LA, in order to vote in the Pennsylvania primary election! Make sure you’re all registered to vote, by the way ;)
I had an amazing week, and now I’m on my way back to campus (and all of the homework I’ve been procrastinating for a week while on vacation). Wish me luck!
