Ghetto living.

So, I live in the ghetto (and I know I sometimes said that Grey Lynn was the hood - but now I am serious).

Our apartment was marketed as Prospect Heights but is really Crown Heights and the neighborhood demographic is 90% Caribbean, 9% Hasidic Jew, and our building is probably the 1% other. It is very dirty and our neighbors have some kind of illicit gambling/ dog fighting/ fight club situation going on so it’s very loud at night. All the shops near us have serious bullet proof glass. The people are very friendly and nice though, some of the boys too much so – yesterday my roommate got told something so rude I could never write it down! Her response was “thank you” – said with genuine Minnesotan enthusiasm and politeness.

It’s incredible how different neighborhoods are here. On the day I came to move into the apartment I first went to pick up the key from a very traditional Hasidic Jewish neighborhood and I turned up in a tiny dress as it's hot here and I had no idea. Afterwards I was waiting for a bus and realized that all the girls had no skin exposed and all the boys were in full suits and top hats; a lady on the street then told me that I wouldn’t see anyone else dressed like me around here as it’s a very traditional religious community and filled me in on some of the regulations – girls fully covered from age 3, stockings have to be darker than skin color – it was really interesting. I tried to take photos kind of secretly but felt rude so here’s a pic from http://ericleetroyer.com/?paged=2

That night I also went on an Immigrant Walking Tour about the different early US cultural groups. The difference between my Caribbean neighborhood, the Hasidic Jewish community, Chinatown, the old Jewish quarter and the NYU area is so great I felt I’d been in 10 different countries in a day.

To show you how different things are here are some pics from around where I live: one taken in Crown Heights and the other a few streets from here in the gentrified Prospect Heights.

So, we are just a few blocks from a really lovely area and our area is really colorful – tomorrow there is a Caribbean Labor day festival which my roommate Laura and I are really looking forward to.

Speaking of Laura – she is great! Which is lucky as we only met via email before Wednesday. Moving into our apartment has been an ordeal thanks to IKEA – I am still sleeping on a yoga mattress, though we did have four trolleys of stuff so losing one had to be expected.

Our apartment is really, really lovely and is starting to look great (we have a nice fall themed living room going on) and shop people are very helpful to us – I think we seem helpless, which I am a bit, luckily Laura is less so... I will upload pictures if IKEA ever brings the rest of our furniture.

Laura’s brother and some of his friends who are in the Marine Corps have been staying here and providing me with a military education, as well as teaching me American culture and lingo, so that’s been fun.

School starts on Tuesday, and I’ve been so busy settling in and exploring I do not feel at all like I’m here to study. I have met my program director and the one other incoming student and both of them made me really excited about starting, as do my courses: two statistics courses as well as seminars in Psychology and Social Intervention and Theories of Change in Applied Psychology.

Well, despite the party going on outside my window, I think it’s bedtime – night friends.

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