Apartment Search and Street Layouts

Yesterday, we put in our application and made a deposit on an apartment in W-S, NC. The apartment complex is about a 2 mile walk (or bike ride) from the door of the psychology building on campus, which is about as close as we could find. (There was a set of somewhat seedier apartments that were about 1 mile out.) It is a 2-bedroom apartment, 1200 square feet with an open-feeling floor plan, and is $800 per month, including water/sewer/etc. (This is almost $300 less per month than our current apartment.) It is on the top floor (second) and is also rabbit-compatible if/when Leo moves to NC. I'm quite pleased with it. Our move-in date is August 7th.

One thing that we are discovering from driving around is that the road layout of this city is insane. Perhaps it does not reach San Antonio levels of laid out by a drunk man on a blind mule in a sandstorm crazy, but it seems pretty bad. It lacks the useful access road system that is so common on Texas highways, but I was expecting that. I was also expecting that the street name system wouldn't make any sense (as, e.g., Tulsa's system does).

What I was not expecting was that the street layout would diverge so extremely from any kind of grid pattern, that streets would change names so frequently, that so many streets would just curve back on themselves and not really go anywhere (as in a housing subdivision), and, worst of all, that major streets simply do not intersect each other. Our first attempts to drive places while looking at a city map failed because the map does not accurately indicate when two streets that cross each other actually intersect.

In the area right near campus/our new apartment/our current hotel, the map shows Street A and Street B to intersect, but they don't in reality, while Street A and Street C do, while the map shows the opposite. The Google map isn't any better because it gives the impression that all the streets intersect where they meet.

By "do not intersect," I mean that Street A passes under Street B. This means that you have to learn how to navigate on two different vertical levels of streets. In some cases, to turn left from Street A onto Street B, you take a right exit on Street C, which curves around and dips up or down to intersect with Street B. Sometimes there simply is no easy way to get from one street to the other.

In general, I get this sort of feeling about it: Typically, I think of roads as providing a network of pathways by which a person can get from Point A to Point B. Sometimes this is on an easier-to-understand grid system and sometimes on a more curving and winding set of passageways, but basically the streets intersect each other and allow for a good deal of variety in what particular route you take. But so far, this area of town feels very different - it's like there are a given number of set paths that you can take, and it's up to you to figure out how to navigate your way to the entrance onto one of these paths to get where you ultimately want to go.

Divided streets also mean that you frequently can't turn left and instead have to figure out some way to get back going the other direction. This is harder than it seems like it should be. There is no such thing as "going around the block," for example. I'm guessing that U-turns must be common (I hope!) or people just end up driving well out of their way to meet up with the One Path that takes you to your destination.

Oh, and of course, they aren't always that great about labeling the streets, either.

I know that any different city seems hard to get around in at first. But I do have a stronger sense of this being random and screwed up than I did with Houston or Austin when I first moved there, for example, and Tulsa seems like the most rational city in the world in comparison if you consider only the streets and not the confusing conjunction of streets and the highway system.

The area of Washington, D.C. near the Mall should have been easy to navigate since the streets were on a grid with letter streets in one direction and numerical streets in another. (Our hotel was at 15th and M.) I even made the classic mistake of commenting to the other (also navigationally-challenged) people the first night we went to dinner that it would be hard to get lost as long as we could recite the alphabet, count, and remember where we started. But on top of and intersecting the grid is another set of streets named after states (e.g. Pennsylvania Avenue), and the intersections, which usually featured some gigantic statue in the middle with a traffic circle surrounding it, were poorly marked. The number and letter streets also would sometimes be interrupted by a state street for a block or so; for instance, you might be on 15th St, then need to turn to go down a state street for a block, then turn again to continue on 15th St. This was particularly confusing at night on foot.

Other things to get used to in this town include:

There are approximately 876.3 gazillion trees. I am starting to recognize stretches of road by the particular combination of trees along side it. We know from the Gram Parsons song that in South Carolina, there are many tall pines; I can now confirm that this is true of North Carolina as well. In general, the town is much of a greenness. I'm beginning to understand what is meant by the phrase "the forests of eastern North America."

If you order "iced tea" in a restaurant, they might just bring you sweet tea by default. Also, restaurants do not regularly stock Dr. Pepper (for Robert). The ubiquitous Food Lion grocery stores do carry it, however.

According to the 2000 US Census, the population is 34.4% African-American and 12.2% Hispanic. Austin is 8.5% African-American and 34.2% Hispanic. This difference is immediately noticeable. Welcome to the South.

The bird life is very different. The most obvious aspect of this is the lesser diversity (e.g. only one kind of kingfisher instead of the 3 in the Austin area), but there are other more pleasant differences, too. American robins are everywhere right now. I heard a singing wood thrush for the first time, and it was lovely. Eastern towhees, which I basically never see in Austin, breed here also and have already taught me their distinctive "drink your tea" song. I have a chance at a life scarlet tanager or brown-headed nuthatch this week (or later) if I can see my way into all that damn foliage.

A 7-degree lower temperature in June makes a huge difference in one's comfort level.