After spending our first two months in central Manhattan, I started to widen the hunt for our next apartment. Almost everyone we met lived in Brooklyn anyway and we'd finally accepted that taking the subway to work wasn't such a deal breaker (we're a little slow on the uptake sometimes). Brooklyn is absolutely enormous, in fact, if it was independent from the rest of New York, it would be the 4th largest city in the USA. Not so long ago, Brooklyn was where you lived if you couldn't afford Manhattan, but now parts of the borough are more popular than their Manahttan equivalents. This wasn't where we were headed though. In my search, I found an apartment which cost less for two months than we'd been paying for one, partly because the price included a discount for looking after the owners cat. Little did he know how much I'd missed having a pet, I probably would have paid for the privilege of a little furry hot water bottle pal, so, haha. I win. I've talked quite extensively about Harrison and Prospect Lefferts Gardens before, so I'll keep this brief, but damn, we miss that awesome little cat.

As an aside, I've got a theory that housecats tend to be friendlier than their outdoor equivalents. As we all know, cats don't give a monkeys about us, but being kept inside means they have less to focus on outside of their humans, so they pay us more attention. Despite that, I am not a massive fan of keeping cats inside. The apartment was a strange little hobbit hole, on the basement floor of a house. This meant two things, one, that poor tall Mr kept bumping his head on low hanging beams, and two, that Harrison only had tiny little windows to mournfully stare out the window at the free cats outside. There are undoubtedly cats who don't care about going outside (I've had one myself, though she was advancing in years, and did little except eat and sleep anyway), but Harrison was not one of them, and I felt horribly guilty every time I shooed him away from the door, as I left the apartment.

Our next apartment was in Bedford Stuyvesant, or Bed Stuy, which used to have a reputation as quite dangerous, both Biggie Smalls and Jay-Z were brought up in the area and 'Do The Right Thing' was set there. Nowadays, it's on it's way to gentrification. I'd imagine to the horror of some of its long term residents. I can see why it's being targeted by young professionals, there is some beautiful architecture and fast subway links into Manhattan, but it's not lost its personality yet. The super posh wine local wine shop was offset by the local grocery stores selling pigs tails and snouts… As well as the supermarket aisles of strange exotic foods that mystified me. The area was also well served by every fast food restaurant you could ever wish for, all the bigs had branches within 5 minutes of our place… Something that is apparently a race issue? It's not something I'd thought about before (being white, even a white that likes to think she's aware of prejudice, means a lot of insidious racism passes me by), but I'll tell you this… There are very few fast food restaurants in the predominantly white area we live now, so maybe there's something to this. I'm generally much more aware of my race here in America (even in NYC, which is barely even America in its truest sense) and the segregation of areas is much more pronounced here than it is in London.

The apartment itself was the polar opposite of the dark little basement we'd been in. On the first floor of a brownstone, with huge windows and constant sunlight, Mr (who is not a morning person) wasn't delighted with this turn of events. The open kitchen was a blessing for me though, after the strange cupboard kitchens I'd had to deal with previously. It was fairly clean too, but suffered from the lack of comfy sofa… Which I amended in our current sublet. More on this next time when I tell tale of our move to poncey Park Slope.

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