I'll house you

Classes officially start today, but none of the ones I'm taking begin till Monday. So apart from some preliminary reading, I have plenty of time on my hands. I've just about sorted the mounds of paperwork, and the next couple of days are about exploration.

So before I expand my horizons, and since Dan (I'm not sure which one?) asked, I'll say a bit about my accommodation. I'm living in a large house with another (part time) phil grad student, the house's owner, and her mother (and two dogs and two cats). This is by no means an unusual arrangement here; a lot more of the housing is of the lodgings type, rather than shared houses. By many measures, I've fallen on my feet somewhat. My rent is cheap, the other occupants are friendly and relaxed, and I have all the facilities I could reasonably wish for. And a pool in the back yard.

The house is in a suburb of Miami, about four miles south of the university. Again, the distance isn't unusual. Since everything here is arranged for driving, the city is sprawling, and most amenities are awkwardly spaced for the pedestrian. I have a 15 minute walk to the nearest metro stop, from where I can catch a train that deposits me right outside the university. I also have a 15 minute walk to pick up the most basic of groceries; laughably, this means that it takes me as long to acquire a pint of milk here as it did when I was living in Langdale. I have absolutely no idea where the nearest pub/bar is. I suspect there isn't one within walking distance.

I did investigate one other possibility for housing at the weekend; a room in a solidly constructed treehouse, in a smallholding bizarrely situated in the middle of one of Miami's less salubrious districts, run and rented by a greying hippy. The room was very, very cheap, and the place itself an incredible oasis of green. But is was far, far too far from the uni, and the landlord struck me as having that brusque self-interest that you sometimes find in old hippies, which seems jarringly at odds with their professed ethos.

So anyway, I'm staying here in Kendall for now, and probably for a while. If you'd like my postal address, email me for it. Anybody could be reading this.