New York Menace

I don't know when I'll have the opportunity to travel again, with working full time and studying for the bar--I feel like I'm stuck in a jar! A smelly jar where people put garbage on the streets instead of garbage cans like the rest of the civilized world and rats and roaches cavort in the streets...Actually, I do really like New York, but in the past month it has not been kind.

Through all my travels, I have never, ever gotten bed bugs. I've visited some very dirty places, and never have I had to deal with these awful little blood suckers. Seriously, I do not understand that fetish with vampires that has swept the young adult world, since any type of blood sucking creature is repulsive. Anyhow, after my 3 years at Columbia, I had to leave student housing. To be fair, I had been really excited to find a real apartment, and did not realize it would be such a nightmare. I was originally going to move to Brooklyn, but that ended up falling through, even though I had already moved the bulk of my stuff to that area. Since I had to find another place at the last minute, I ran all across the city looking at various rooms. I met some really weird people; on hindsight I probably should not have gone alone. At one place, the roommate would have been this 40-year-old guy who had a wall with photos of all the girls that ever lived with him. It's sad because he is very lonely...but also kind of creepy. He basically only rents the place to young women. 

After a week of frantic searching, I found a nice place right across the street from my old dorm. It was a bit more expensive that I would have wanted to pay, but it was clean, really nice, and had a washer and dryer in the apartment. I moved in, and literally, 4 days later I found out the place was infested with bed bugs. Not even a minor infestation--there were bed bug droppings all over the mattress, with eggs. I also found live bugs. Apparently the existing tenants had reported the problem to the landlord the day after I moved in, but didn't say anything to me until later because they didn't want me to freak out. 

Well, I did freak out. Actually, I was calm about it for the first 3-4 days after finding out, since I thought the apartment was going to get fumigated. Then, it turned out that the landlord was not going to get the place fumigated for at least another week. Then I freaked out. There were bites all over my body, and I was starting to get even worse reactions to them. They used to remain fairly small, but towards the end they would become bright red welts. I had all of my stuff in bags and was trying to sanitize it myself. Then I gave up, called a professional sanitizer to clean my stuff and put it into storage until I found another place, and left the apartment with a bag of very basic necessities (and two stuffed animals). I washed those in hot water and put them in the dryer for an hour. Luckily I had no furniture, so most of my stuff was salvageable--I ended up throwing a lot of stuff away if it was not worth the trouble of sanitizing, or if it was something difficult to sanitize. I found eggs on my diploma, so had to throw that away. Luckily, the people at Columbia were really sympathetic and mailed another one to my parents' address. 

Fortunately, I had some really kind friends who let me stay with them. Now however, I'm still looking for apartments. Since the bar exam is looming over me, I'll probably wait until later to do that. From now on though, I'm always going to (1) ask for bed bug history (apparently it's a new law in New York that every landlord has to disclose bed bug history within the past year in the entire complex) (2) inspect any furniture and (3) invest in a mattress cover.