June 9th, 2011 - Post #2

So as I knew I would, I'm becoming settled in good old Spanish harlem. My clearances for work STILL aren't processed yet. So my first official day is going to be this coming up Monday...which means that I'll have lived in the city an whole week without doing anything at all, which to be honest, has been a dream of mine for a long time. To be able to live in NYC without having to work or worry about making money...completely a fake life. I'll take advantage of it while I still can.

I have accomplished a couple things this week though. I had my orientation for the internship; we just watched some videos about the long history of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. It was founded in 1893, making it the oldest visiting nurse service in the country. The organization itself is HUGE, employing over 15,000 people in the NYC area, and seeing over 30,000 patients everyday (about 2.4 million patients per year). And while it started at purely a service where nurses would visit patients in their homes, there are now many other services as well, including clinics like the one I'll be working at.

It's taking extra time to get me started because all of the other summer interns were either in Human Resources or Finance, and didn't need to get child abuse background checks or fingerprinted.

Like I said, I'm getting a lot more comfortable with the area I'm in. I still can't tell if its "dangerous" or just that it's an uncomfortable feeling still. I have walked around a little at night, and yes, I'm the only white person (unless I'm walking Meredith Stevens back to the subway stop), but as my cousin who lives in Brooklyn said, you can get robbed in ANY area of NYC, you just have to be conscious wherever you are. After hearing about it from multiple sources, I decided to order my first load of groceries through Fresh Direct online, and it is being delivered to my apartment on Saturday. The prices are comparable to those in a grocery store, and it's only $6 delivery charge. So we'll see how well it works. And my roommate is really nice, and we're getting along fine. She is a native of Spain, and still has a very thick accent. She speaks pretty fluent English, but there is a clear language barrier for many topics we've tried to talk about. It's looking like my sarcasm may go over her head most the time, which is a hard thing for me to deal with, since I'm very sarcastic a lot of the time.

I'm definitely ready to get started, 3 more days of waiting and just living up city life. Hopefully I'll have some more interesting stuff to talk about soon.