December 9, 2021

September 2021

Life

I had about a week to get settled in to NYC before I started work. During that week, I spent most of my time finding an apartment.

With a friend who also just moved to NYC, we booked a month-long Airbnb first to slowly carry out the apartment hunt. However, the poor state of our Airbnb forced me to speed up the process: our place was small and old, the only sink in the unit happened to be constantly leaking, and the last straw was the sighting of a cockroach. I still have memories using a dirty rag to clean up the flooded kitchen after waking up because the leak had overfilled the bucket overnight. In hindsight, the pictures of the place on Airbnb weren't incorrect, just deceptive; they were strategically taken and our minds filled in the gaps beyond the pictures with something better than it actually was.

My biggest takeaway from this experience was the conclusion to live in a newer building, where repairs would be addressed quickly. I didn't want to pay rent for cockroaches.

Finding an apartment in NYC as someone new to the city is an overwhelming experience. There are more neighborhoods than you can count, and it turns out they're all quite different (one of the questions real estate agents first ask, in addition to your income and credit score, is which neighborhood you want to live in). There's a huge supply of housing available that provided endless options to my search. Even by filtering for new buildings near the subway within a certain price range, I probably reached out to more than 100 potential units on StreetEasy. For a few days, I spent most of my time on the subway getting around the city between apartment tours.

After seeing dozens of apartments that I wouldn't mind living in, I realized that three related and more personal factors I gravitated towards was the orientation of the apartment (I preferred west facing units for the warm afternoon light), the amount of natural lighting, and the view outside. I figured, with work from home staying around, that it'd be less bearable if I stayed in a poorly lit unit that looked out into another building.

Ultimately, I found my place by accident. I had arranged to see a 1-bedroom unit that I didn't fancy in the same building, but the agent mentioned that a studio had just became available and wasn't listed yet. When I walked in, I sort of knew this would be it: it was a top-floor corner unit with a view of the Manhattan skyline, surprisingly below my price range. The unit wasn't big, just slightly over 400 sqft, but it was enough for one. I was at the right place at the right time. Apparently the day after I toured the unit, someone else also applied.

Golden hour at home

While I live right above the subway station at the intersection of two main roads, Elmhurst is a an overall quiet neighborhood. Someone recently described the neighborhood as suburban Flushing, which is fair in that the neighborhood is less dense, close to Flushing, and very Asian. That being said, there are plenty of businesses within walking distance; I've been trying to visit all the authentic cash-only Asian options around from streetside Chinese skewers to Malaysian Laksa. There's a huge mall down the street, and also a large Indonesian presence here; I live across the street from Indo Java, which I now frequent weekly for lunch. However, going to Manhattan is a non-trivial affair; it takes about 40 minutes to get to the office from my place. I forget who told me that finding an apartment is about balancing trade-offs between quality, rent, and location. In that sense, I traded off location for quality and rent.

The first week of work consisted mostly of trainings and was very chill. We learned how to use the customized and supercharged Powerpoint that felt as complex in functionality as Photoshop, played sims-style online simulations on dealing with tricky client interactions, and did online trainings like why bribery is bad. In the second week, we flew to Dallas for a GAMMA regional training, which really is a misnomer. It was, however, a great and fun opportunity to meet potential future colleagues on different cases. My team won a $30 Amazon gift card for coming 3rd in betting on virtual horses, and we each received 'cowboy certificates' after riding a horse for literally 2 minutes and learning how to rope.

Big Tex at the Texas State Fair

I delayed my return and spent the weekend in Dallas with a friend who flew in. For the fourth largest metro area in America, there really isn't a lot to see. Perhaps the most popular attraction is the Sixth Floor Museum, which details the sequence of events surrounding the assassination of JFK. But the main activity we did that weekend was the Texas State Fair, ticking off something I've had on my bucket list for a few years now. We had fun sitting in pick-up trucks so high off the ground it was an inconvenience to get into, and also had an alarmingly unhealthy amount of fried foods.

Then, I got staffed on my first case.

Food

The deep fried I-35: a tribute to a Texan roadtrip. It features kolache dough, smoked beef brisket, a glaze made from peach juice and Dr. Pepper, and peach slices with powdered sugar.

• Beef rib (Dallas, TX): my favorite thing in Texas BBQ is the beef rib. It’s very tender and has a good balance of fatty and leaner parts. At Terry Black's BBQ, the smoking process is exquisite, producing a subtle yet lasting flavor.
• Loro (Dallas, TX): a fairly new Asian and BBQ fusion spot created by the founders of Franklin BBQ and Uchi. The dishes are very well executed, including one of the best char sius I've had, as well as an elote with lovely hints of yuzu.
• Fried food (Dallas, TX): the Texas state fair is a hubristic showcase on the creative extents of deep fried foods. You can have deep fried lemonade and butter (it tastes like what you imagine it to taste like – melted butter in fried dough), as well as classics like oreos or corndogs, which BTW were invented at the fair. However, my favorite thing at the fair was the Turkey leg; it wasn't even deep fried.
• Shanghainese food (NYC, NY): there are a lot of Shanghainese restaurants in NYC. Everyone knows soup dumplings, but there are also classic dishes like 马兰头 (Indian aster) or 葱油拌面 (scallion oil noodle). I think this is because there are a lot of Shanghainese people in NYC – every now and then I overhear Shanghainese on the streets – as well as Shanghainese cuisine being fairly agreeable in its lighter and sweeter flavors.
• Awang Kitchen (Elmhurst, NY): before the house tour for my current apartment, I had lunch at this Indonesian place next door. It was the best Indonesian food I had in the US, and it probably biased me when visiting the apartment. After I submitted my rental application, I thought to myself how I could eat so much great Indonesian food after I moved in.

Misc

A great deal in Flushing Chinatown: Mangosteen. They were as sweet as they could've been.

Working at the office is sort of surreal: you forget about the existence of COVID. Because everyone is vaccinated, you are not required to wear masks and as a result nobody does. The office is often full, and people are doing face to face meetings. Overall, it's a pretty refreshing experience, so I try to go a couple times a week.

I noticed that things were out of stock across the board when I was buying stuff for my apartment. Turns out that there are supply chain issues everywhere right now. I recently saw a youtube video explaining this.

Doesn't the word suggest have the weirdest spelling, relative to how it's pronounced?

I'm working on a list of the best soup dumpling spots in NYC. Stay tuned. But in the mean time, here is a spoon + saucer for soup dumplings. Should I call it a spaucer?

One of the largest inconveniences about the New York Subway is its lack of reception in between stations. Is it really not possible to install service below ground?

I encountered some anti-maskers for the first time while in line at the Sixth Floor Museum. Even though there was a mandate for masks inside, they intentionally wore it below their mouths and used 'drinking water' as an excuse even after staff kindly asked them to wear their masks properly. The group kept talking amongst themselves about the usual right-wing talking points and how they wouldn't follow the rules, intentionally loud enough for us to hear. They were projecting weakness with what that they thought was 'badass'; you could tell they were nervous and it's all they kept talking about. When I got annoyed and asked one of them to put on their mask in a resolute manner, she actually complied for a bit before drumming up more courage talking to her friends. ¯_(ツ)_/¯. To me, you couldn't tell they were rebelling for a cause they believed in; they were just being belligerent for the sake of it.

I was disappointed to find out that the crab soup dumplings here are different from the ones back home. It turns out that 大闸蟹 (Chinese Mitten Crab), a particularly popular type of crab from the Yangtze River Delta, is a highly invasive species and forbidden in the US. The roe of these crabs are the most prized part, and make up the distinct flavor in crab soup dumplings.

The beef rib at Terry Black's BBQ