It quickly became evident that finding an apartment on our own was pretty much impossible, there are intricacies too numerous to list and the language barrier was losing its comedic quality by mid-afternoon of our first day of searching.

We didn't know much about the different areas and it's not easy to discern anything visually because widely disparate neighborhoods exist shoulder-to-shoulder.

Undaunted by the practical frustrations we laughed ourselves silly at our various errors and subway blunders, and after the weekend got into an awesome little apartment with the help of a business associate of Matthew's who connected us with an agent who introduced us to an apartment manager, etc... (Not in the areas pictured here, something more middle-of-the-road)