The Tension Begins

Today was the first day of orientation, as well as the first day of the housing search which is exhausting. We had the city walk today--not so tiring which means i'm developing some walking legs. We did a perimeter of the city which went from lunch to dinner, 4 hours. We were all frozen by the end of it. For lunch we went to Reading Market which has this awesome array of ethnic food all under one roof and I had some delicious Chicken Lo Mein. For dinner each group from the city walk was to come with a different ethnic food, ours was chinese. It was so delicious! I got a great mix of italian, thai, indian, chinese, middle eastern, and of course a philly cheese steak, all on one plate--love it! Seriously, I had this tomato bread that was like a cold pizza with this tomato sauce on top, which sounds like a bread stick, but it was so flavorful and ugh so good. Anyways, I definitely understand why they say that Philly knows their food.

Well enough about that--we got the lists of available housing and signed up for viewings. Our schedule tomorrow is packed with meetings at TPC in the morning and viewings every hour across the city until 5:00. Hopefully by that time we will have found a place. Tonight we checked out two places as well. Up in north philly we got the access code from the realtor to check it out and it was a cute 2 story, 3 bedroom, with one bath, close to the arts district (by the rocky steps and other museums), but we had to wait for the bus for 20 mins which is not going to work for my daily commutes to the hospital. Anyways it was cute, but the neighborhood was so quiet that it was almost creepy. Secondly we went to look at the outside of this "mansion" that we are viewing tomorrow. Apparently it can fit at most 10 people and we definitely have enough people who are interested, maybe too many in fact. I didn't really like the area. I felt safe, but it was a little more rundown and a little farther from the city life.

I'm sure tomorrow will bring many more possibilities, as well as struggles, with living arrangements. We might have too many, too little, I might not want to join in what others are doing and will be stuck. Who knows?

Tomorrow we are to dress professionally so the landlords will respect us more because we are "professional interns" and I hope that works. I hate that college student stigma. I personally feel that I don't fit that and I had the assumptions. Anyways on top of wearing professional clothes, we are going to have to trudge through this sleet storm that just hit Philly. "Winter mix" sounds so much less daunting. Thankfully we can rely on the subway for some of our routes between houses...

Things for prayer/good thoughts: the weather, where I will live, who I will live with, that my supervisors get all of my clearances, a positive attitude, and that I get the "student worker" position for the Philadelphia Center so I can get some extra money while I'm here.