cww.blog!

I spent today looking for apartments to rent in the Jersey City and Newport areas, across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Unfortunately, Jersey City is too trashy, and Newport is too expensive. One of the Newport high-rises I visited had one-bedroom apartments starting at $2,700. For a place where I'm just going to sleep at night for six months, I'm definitely not paying that much.

I also got terribly lost driving around Jersey City, ending up in a deserted rail yard and later in a really bad part of town. That problem was solved by calling my dad and asking him to figure out directions to the nearest Starbucks for me. Which worked wonderfully, except the Starbucks was closed due to a water main break at the weekend. No big deal, though, since their T-Mobile HotSpot was still active, and that's the real reason I wanted to go there, anyway.

I took a really cool picture of the marina adjacent to that Starbucks with the Manhattan skyline in the background. If I remember, I'll post it when I get back to Pittsburgh on Wednesday (or the wee hours of Thursday morning).

Now that I'm no longer under delusions that I can rent an inexpensive apartment in a nice neighborhood within spitting distance of Manhattan, I will travel to the farther reaches of suburban New York City tomorrow and look for apartments there. Originally, that was the plan, but I got side-tracked by mirages of being in the right place at the right time for some of the nicer properties and being able to swing a sweet deal.

Navigating this part of New Jersey is absolutely awful, and the weather people inside my cell phone say storms will show up tomorrow. That's going to be no fun at all, since I have no idea where I'm going most of the time. Hopefully, the outer suburbs will be somewhat more navigable than the mess of highways and potholes around Secaucus (pronounced SEE-kaw-kus by the locals, by the way).

I need to make a decision about somewhere to live in the next, oh, about 40 hours. Wish me luck tomorrow!