Pittsburgh Adventure

Lindsay and I have spent most of the week in Pittsburgh.  Our two main goals were to find somewhere to live when we come here in about a month to go to school and to talk with my academic advisor to help me finalize my school plans.  We were successful on both missions.

We got here and got our rental car.  My first recommendation for anyone visiting us or Pittsburgh is to come from the west side.  This is hard to avoid when you are coming from the airport, but the approach is pretty fantastic.  You are in green foresty hills,  like this:


Then you go into a fairly long tunnel, then you pop out of the tunnel and see this:
The picture doesn't really do it justice.  As soon as you get out of the tunnel there is a bridge and the downtown/skyscraper part of the city is right there in your face.  It is pretty awesome.


Our hotel was a Holiday Inn right across the street from the "Cathedral of Learning".  It is the tallest educational building in the western hemisphere.  It is one of the main buildings of the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) campus.  Here are some pictures:

On Wednesday we walked through it and this is what it looked like.  The middle section for about five stories is the common room.  It reminded us a lot of the great hall at Hogwarts

We spent all day on Wednesday looking at apartments.  The first one we went to was awful.  The wood laminate flooring was way too spongy and gross feeling.  Every room was bad and the kitchen and bathroom where tiny.  The second one was possibly even worse.  It wasn't in a very good part of town, so we were already skeptical.  The guy showing us the apartment showed us two in the same complex and both were disgusting.  There were people living in the apartments and both were complete pig styes.  THere was food, cloths, garbage, and all sorts of other junk filling up everywhere on the counters, window sills, floor, etc.  They were gross.  We saw two or three others and they were all not great.  Most apartments in the city are older, with little storage, and with tiny bathrooms and kitchens.  There were a couple that we decided might work out okay, but nothing great.

Here is Lindsay looking for apartments.

 When we walked into the one that we ended up choosing we were like, "Woah".  It was pretty different than most of the other ones we had found.  Most that we looked at have been two bedroom apartments.  This one has just one bedroom, but it is pretty good sized.   The  kitchen is big and modernish looking (as opposed to super old looking).  The bathroom is good size too, and without gross brown stuff in the tub or sink.  The living room area connects to the kitchen by a little serving bar that pokes out.  It is pretty good.  It is on the third floor of a house, with other apartments on the lower two floors.  One thing that we loved was that there was a lot more light in this one than any of the others we had seen.  There is parking for one car around back, and usually parking on the street in the front.  There is a washer and dryer in the basement that we can use for free.  The neighborhood is filled with all these fun little houses.  It is in a good safe area, about 2 miles from my school.

Here are some pictures.  You will have to wait to get inside pictures, because we didn't take any while we were there.

Our future apartment (on the third floor)

The houses right across the street

The street.  It is pretty dark, but you can see it is fairly narrow with cars parked on both sides..

As we went through the rest of the day, every apartment we saw was compared to that one.   Some were bigger, so we could fit our stuff easier, but none was a nice and finally we decided that we wanted that one.  We felt that if we lived anywhere else we would miss or feel bad for not choosing it, but couldn't say the same for any other apartment that we visited.

Thursday evening we took the bus downtown and went on a self-guided walking tour of the city that I found online.   It was pretty fun.  It is amazing how much more history there is here than in Utah or New Mexico.  There are buildings that were built in the late 1700s and early 1800s.  A lot of historical people who have lived the  "American Dream" have spent a lot of their lives here, like Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, and HJ Heinz.  They started out poor and then worked hard and became millionaires.  There are all sorts of buildings that they commissioned in downtown.

There are all of these old churches right in the middle of downtown and everywhere.  It is kind of crazy to see them right next to the big tall skyscrapers.

Pittsburgh is called the city of bridges, because there are a whole bunch of bridges ( 446 according to Wikipedia) that cross the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers.  These come together at the west point of Pittsburgh and form the Ohio river.

Carnegie Mellon campus  right next to the University of Pittsburgh campus.  I have to say the the Pitt campus is way more impressive, but CMU does have a few cool buildings, like the Mellon Institute (which from what I can tell is where the computer science department lives).

Mellon Institute

I talked with my advisor, Onur Mutlu about my classes.  He gave me some good pointers and recommended some other people I should email for more information.  I am excited and a little nervous for school, but I am sure I will manage.

That was basically our trip.  Hopefully we can go see Harry Potter 7 tomorrow morning before our flight leaves in the late afternoon.  It has been a successful trip.

Here some other random musings and thoughts about Pittsburgh.

-  Apparently Pittsburgh, because of its industrial history, grew distinctive communities and neighborhoods.  Squirrel Hill, where we looked at a lot of apartments, has a lot of Jewish people (Supposedly the second largest Jewish community outside of New York).  There was an area of Wilkinsburg where we noticed that we were the only white people around.  There was a section for "Little Italy".  That made it pretty fun.

- Putting streets on a grid is super awesome.  Utah has the streets on a numeric grid, which makes everything perfectly easy.  Albuquerque has named streets, but still on a north-south, east-west grid - still pretty east.  Pittsburgh is like a bunch of spaghetti dropped on a bunch of hills.  It is super easy to get turned around and not know what direction is which or where we are going.   Also, things seemed super far away from each other one time can seem close together the next.   We kept finding streets that we knew in places where they shouldn't have been (or so it seemed).   There is no way we could have gotten around without turn-by-turn directions on our phones (GPS).

- On a related note, wide streets are also super nice.  The streets here are very narrow and I am almost sure that sooner or later I am going to smack my side mirrors into something.

- It is very green.  There are trees everywhere.  This is kind of crazy, because you can be in the middle of a forest and not be able to see and civilization or buildings or anything, and then two minutes later you are back in the big city with tall buildings and stuff.  Also, when they say "park", as often as not what they really mean is forest with a few grassy areas and maybe a playground scattered around it.   

I guess that is all for now.  We like it here.