Fingers Crossed

It's been a crazy few days! Kraig and I flew into Chicago on Thursday to apartment hunt and check in with future employers. Note to self: there are advantages of flying ass-early in the morning, to wit, minimal check-in and security lines. Apparently, lots of people like to fly on Thursday evenings around 8pm. Who knew?!

One fairly gross wrap a la airport concession stand later, and Kraig and I were buzzing westward, navigating a new subway system, and flopping unceremoniously into our really cute room at the Hotel Indigo.

On Friday we went out separate ways. Kraig had an interview and I headed north to Evanston for a meeting in the math department. I managed to catch most of an undergrad admissions info session. It's the sort of thing I was totally disinterested in doing while at Tufts, but I'm determined to be better informed this time. I did learn about how the university is organized into different colleges and a little about their degree requirements. Not bad stuff to know.


After that, Kraig and I decided to meet up to have a bite to eat before checking out a place that he'd found listed on craigslist that looked promising. We ended up going to a middle eastern restaurant close to the Loyola stop. The food was great and it seemed like they turned the place into a hooka bar or nightclub in the evenings. We were the only people there at 2pm and lounged around on a group of sofas while eating. We walked around to check out the neighborhood for a few minutes after that, and then checked out the apartment.

It was an underwhelming experience, to say the least. I think I'll go with the description our agent from Chicago Apartment Finders used today, and say that the area was "isolated" and not particularly "walkable." There wasn't any of that city feeling you get around productive shop fronts and lively neighborhoods. The apartment itself had been seriously over-hyped as well. We returned to the hotel room and I did some more poking around on craiglist to see what people were saying about other neighborhoods. What I found wasn't reassuring: the "hip, young adult" areas were either super expensive, or removed from public transportation. I started to get really anxious for the first time about finding a place to live. What if this place was the best we could afford?

Fortunately, we had an appointment with an agent through Chicago Apartment Finders this morning and after freaking us out by saying that our choices would be "limited" based on our criteria, he showed us five different units that all had something going for them. The first place we looked at ended up being our favorite, even though it did not have the one thing we thought was a deal-breaker    a second bathroom. The current tenants were packing up while we were looking around, and it was amazing how much stuff they'd managed to fit into that place! They were moving into a house that they'd just bought, presumably to have more space for their approx. 2 year old son to run around.

It's a perfectly classic Chicago apartment, as far as I can tell. It's the third floor of a three-story building in a cute neighborhood in Edgewater where the landlord lives on the first floor and the second floor is a guest flat. At this point we've applied and are waiting to hear back from the landlord, so I will forgo describing the place in more detail until then. I'm feeling much more optimistic about moving to Chicago now after finding this location and doing lots of successful wandering around tonight.

More about our evening tomorrow (later today at this point), because Kraig just gave me a "look." Gnite!