Pittsburgh: Week One

So far, Pittsburgh has been great.

And, with me not having a job yet, and Amy not starting hers until the end of the month, it's like we're on vacation, with all of our stuff. That we haven't received mail yet adds to that illusion.

Fun story short, we had to go to the post office and inform them that our apartment actually exists. It has a separate entrance from the others in our building, so the mailbox is not with the others, so the mail carrier has been sending back our mail, return to sender. We've also had to convince the cable people and the electric people of the apartment number (the cable people said they only have numbers 1-15, but there's only seven apartments in the building).

I had shaved ice for the first time Thursday when we went to Highland Park and had a little picnic dinner. The stand was just like a hot dog stand, and the guy had a contraption that shaved a large block of ice (I say large—it was probably an eight-inch cube, maybe more when he started it). It was in this box with a crank, he turned the crank and it spun on this copper disk and the ice shaved. I imagined that this is the way shaving ice started waaay back in the day. This one seemed authentically old, but it seemed to be a Japanese brand, as it had Japanese characters, a Japanese-sounding English word, and a picture of Fujiyama or Mount Fuji, I get them mixed up :-) It certainly tasted different than snow cones I'd had before, and better than anything that's come out of Snoopy's dog house.

click pic to enlarge

We're at the corner of 13th and Main, but our entrance is in the back of the building. Our bedroom windows are on the surprisingly busy 13th street. A bus stop for Fox Chapel School District's extended education is right outside our window, and evidently a girl named Briana is picked up here some time around eight o'clock. On the fourth, and all weekend, trucks with trailers were parked by our building while their owners enjoyed boating on the Alleghany River just south of us (13th Street goes under the oft-used railroad tracks you see in the picture).

Our apartment is half the size of our Buffalo place, so organizing our stuff has been a task, but so far our first week has been great.