It was a first day like many first days. I was carrying stacks of paperwork along with all my valuable documents and proof of identity.
It began with a drugs test. I would find this odd in the UK but somehow it seems normal here. It is carried out with the humourless efficiency that the US does so well. Once I had provided an adequate sample and the paperwork was completed my automaton escort suddenly became human again and was chatting away about the weather. Americans talk about the weather a lot - in the subsequent orientation session it was the default icebreaker and the correct response whenever the other person let slip from where they hailed. All you had to do was choose: "Oh you must be used to snow much worse than this (Minnesota etc)" or "How lovely it must be for you to experience seasons (San Diego etc)".
The frustrating thing was that I was not actually starting a new job of course. When the session finished and I took the elevator up to the risk management floor I logged on remotely to my London computer. All the problems I had before I still had, just with the novelty of my clock telling me it was 8pm.
The next day we were scheduled to go out with our real estate agent. She began by showing us an enormous two bed-room apartment. This was much larger than I had expected that we could afford but came with the catch that it lacked natural light and was on 23rd street - on the main cross streets in NY (i.e. extremely noisy). The next place was in a coverted hotel on Madison Square Park just opposite my work. This was beautifully presented with top spec furnings but of course much smaller.
Then we set off downtown towards Greenwich Village. This was an area we had indicated we would be interested in. It is mainly residential so there should be more life around than other parts of Manhattan and it is charming. It has no grid system so is trickier to navigate with plenty of parks, including Washington Square Park in the centre. There should be more for J and H to do during the day than the area outside my office but it is hardly far from it.
The trouble with the Village is that most of the buildings are old and we did not want to deal with steps. However, our agent found one elevator building on Christopher Street. It was lovely, really lovely and being one of the tallest buildings around had fantastic views both south and north. The problem was that it was far too small.
So off we set again. The next and final stop was a building over to the west with excellent views of the Hudson. It's in the 'Roman Utilitarian' style - the Roman bit meaning it has arches and the Utilitarian bit referring to its simple orange/red brick exterior and original purpose first as a waterfront warehouse and then as a federal archive building. The entrance hall looks like a very grand hotel but I was not much interested because it was described as one bedroom and was above our budget.
It turned out that it was a duplex apartment and while only technically one bedroom it had a loft area with its own bathroom and acres of storage. The agent had almost not shown it to us because many people with children will not consider apartments with stairs but we are used to it of course. We would need to retain our stair-gates but apart from that it was perfect. Harriet could have the downstairs bedroom and we would take the upstairs. It lacks the city-scape views of the previous place but it has stunning views of the Hudson. There are only two windows but there is no lack of light with such enormous double height windows.
We looked at some other places on-line that the agent sent but it was clear we had made our decision and so we put our names forward for it. There was a lot more scanning of documents and paperwork but we got the approval on Thursday so we are set for next week. Our air shipment has arrived - fingers crossed that our sea shipment comes quickly otherwise we shall be sleeping on the floor!
