Apartment kafuffle

After an early morning wake up and a 4.5 hour bus ride we made it to NEW YORK CITY! So happy to get there we got in a taxi straight away to 59^th and Lexington, to our two bedroom apartment. We had contacted the company earlier to let them know when we would arrive, however they weren’t there to meet us. 15 min later we got a call and from Sarah’s face I could see that something was not right. Apparently upon going to the apartment to clean it after the last guest, the company discovered that it had been trashed so badly that we would not be able to stay in it. Devastated because I had spent so much time organizing it and not sure where we would go, I was not impressed by how the situation was being handled. Hugh (the guy organizing the apartment) told us to go to 48^th between 10^th/11^th and we could stay there.  Having never seen the pace I demanded to get the info before getting in another taxi across town. I was fuming inside but knew getting upset would not achieve anything, so we got an email about the place and got in a taxi to go see it. We met Alberto (the guy who takes you to your apartment) and he showed me up to the apartment. It was really nice, but upon saying we would take it he was like you can only stay here for two weeks then you will have to change places. With no definite answers and all this wishy washy info I refused to be somewhere if we couldn’t be there the entire time. So Alberto took me to 46^th between 9^th/10^th apartment 5A while Sarah waited on 48^th with the bags, there was no point continuing to lug everything around again.

When we got to 5A I seriously could not believe how disgusting and dirty the place was. Apparently the people before us had only been in there one night and had left so much crap in there, and due to them not scheduling someone in there that night the cleaners hadn’t been. Regardless of this fact the apartment was huge and in a great location so I said if they could clean it we would stay there. After about an hour of Alberto on the phone trying to get the cleaners to come, it was decided that the earliest they could get there was early the next morning. So we were kind of back to square one as we had no where to stay night 1.

By this stage Sarah had got in a taxi and brought the bags and was sitting on our steps looking like a homeless person J.  Alberto had the idea that we could stay in 3A instead of 5A, but for some reason his keys were not working. So he called someone to come and unlock it for us. We weren’t really sure if that would be where we would be staying the whole time but Alberto was continuously on the phone with everyone trying to work it out while we sat homeless on the stoop.  Then we all waited on the stoop for another 2hours while his friend was coming only to find out that he hadn’t even left! Alberto was nice enough and we were trying to hold it together and laugh because we had no idea what was going to happen. Alberto got tired of waiting on the stairs so he wanted us to take all our luggage to the 5^th floor and then later when the keys came we could move it down to the 3^rd floor which we had found out would only be for the night. Five flights of stairs and all our luggage was not fun!

After an hour at Starbucks around the corner, Alberto finally got the phone call that his friend was there with the keys, but upon finding him on the 3^rd floor we worked out that the door was locked from the inside and even with crow bars they couldn’t open it. Sarah and I were in fits of giggles at the situation- you couldn’t have made it up if you tried. Then with my great suggestion, Alberto went up to 5A climbed out the window to the fire escape and climbed down through the window of 3A and opened the door.

Finally we had a place to stay for the night! Very excited by this fact but extremely annoyed about wasting our entire day trying to work this out, we had an early night. It wasn’t until nearly 3pm the next day that we were able to get into a real apartment (5A), so again we had wasted our day because we couldn’t do anything but wait. Not happy at all with the company but the apartment is exactly what we needed! Plus from our balcony (fire escape) and our rooftop (fire escape) we can see the NYC skyline including both ends of time square and the Hudson river the other side!