For those of you who may want a brief synopsis of what's going on here, I'm moving out of the 50 states! No, I'm not moving to Europe or anything like that, I'm doing what some might consider crazier: moving into DC!
To be honest, it still surprises me a bit, but I'm really excited about the prospect. Growing up in North Jersey, way out in rural Sussex County, I never pictured myself as a city person. I was not going to like moving to Atlanta for grad school! It's a city, it's in the south, and it's nowhere near the ocean... But after moving, I discovered that living in the city, you can actually walk to restaurants and bars and spend less than 45 minutes traveling to the store! After 6 years there, I really grew to love Atlanta, and living in midtown, I definitely got spoiled by the proximity of everything.
But alas, all good things must come to an end, and thankfully grad school along with it, and I found myself leaving the city I'd amazingly come love and call home, leaving the friends who had become family, and heading somewhere else for a new job. Specializing in space robotics pretty severely limited the list of cities I could live in. The jobs I was looking at meant I basically was going to end up in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, or Washington, DC. Ultimately, Goddard Space Flight Center won out, and I was headed to the DC area (Goddard is in Maryland just outside of DC).
Now, Atlanta is a very different city than DC! Atlanta thinks it had bad traffic, DC actually has bad traffic. Atlanta thinks it has a subway system, DC actually has a subway system. And Atlanta's a very spread out city that requires driving everywhere, while DC has quite a few central, walkable areas. Not to mention the fairly flat DC is much more bike friendly that hilly Atlanta. But DC is a very different city than any other place in the country, too. It doesn't have that skyscraper cluster to call downtown that every other US city has. It has the National Mall and it's own kind of history that gives the city a very unique character. So when it came to figuring out where to live in the area, it was not an easy question to answer.
When I moved to Atlanta, I took a bunch of weekends the end of senior year to visit and find the right home. But I knew nothing about the city. I essentially got lucky, in that I ultimately loved the neighborhood I was living in. But Atlanta's small enough that a few weekends proved enough to figure out the right neighborhood for me. There's no way I could have done that in DC. Since Goddard is out in the suburbs in Maryland, I had already ruled out living close to work, as I'm not yet at that point in my life where living in the suburbs sounds attractive! And since "close to work" was my main priority when choosing where to live in Atlanta, that experience was of little help. So beyond the vague "I want to live somewhere convenient and walkable," I didn't know where I wanted to live, especially with so many different great neighborhoods in DC, and small edge cities like Silver Spring, Bethesda, and Alexandria.
So I found a place to rent in Silver Spring, mainly because it's the easiest to get to work, so that I could take some time after I got here to learn the area and find the right place. After 4 months here, I finally figured out where I wanted to live, and it probably comes as no surprise, but I'm moving downtown! So now it's just a matter of finding the right home for me, which is no easy task, given the list of things I want and how picky I tend to be! Hopefully it'll make for some entertaining stories for you all to read! (Don't worry, there's no amount of time living in Atlanta that could convince me to use the "word" y'all!) Enjoy!
There is nothing wrong with the word y'all.
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