The Rise And Fall Of Good Food

For our first few days in Pittsburgh, meals consisted primarily of:

• breakfast: take-out pastries while waiting for deliveries
• lunch: fast food between trips to Target/Lowes
• dinner: American chain restaurants near Target/Lowes

Having arrived on June 12th, we first ventured out into the larger world on the 14th by walking to the Carnegie Mellon campus--about 35-40 minutes from home. There, we grabbed lunch, wandered around aimlessly, realized we had no idea what we were looking at, felt stupid, and walked back. We live just a block away from Squirrel Hill's downtown area on Murray and Forbes. So, on Monday the 16th we were finally ready to brave the local restaurants. Virg took me to Pamela's Diner for breakfast (pretty good), and we tried a random Italian place for dinner (pretty good).

Every place in the area looks like a dump on the outside, so you never know what you'll find inside. We scored with two dumpy looking places the next day--a Thai place called Sweet Basil (cute place, excellent food) and a deli called Kazansky's (dumpy inside, but with surprisingly excellent menu roughly resembling Max's Diner in California). When we later found that both places were recommended by our Moon Pittsburgh guidebook, we began relying on the guide for most future food needs--right after we let Virg wolf down some biscuits and gravy at Bob Evan's (her favorite Ohio delicacy).

So, in the next week we found some great eats:

• dinner at Mineo's Pizza (supposed to be Pittsburgh's best, but it was really all cheese)
• lunch at Gullifty's (excellent food, excellent menu, excellent desserts!)
• hot chocolate at the Tango Cafe (v.g.)
• dinner at Abay Ethiopian. Yes, Pittsburgh even offers Ethornopian, albeit with a drive to a not-so-great part of town, and with food that was good but not spectacular.
• lunch at the Pittsburgh Deli Company (a long wait for mediocre sandwiches/salads, but in a really cute section of Pittsburgh called Shadyside)
• dinner at Point Brugges Cafe (a great, lively place sitting randomly in a section of otherwise residential blocks)
• brunch at Harris Grill (dumpy area, questionable chain-smoking clientele, pricey food, but well worth it if you imagine you're paying in part for the entertaining food descriptions on the menu)
• lunch at the Rose Tea Cafe (good super-cheapo Chinese in Squirrel Hill)

Yes, we've been eating like kings! But inevitably, we've begun to run out of guide-recommended places to go. So, lately we've started eating at all the non-recommended places in our area. And, not surprisingly, they haven't been as good. And as we run out of nearby non-recommended places, we'll have to try random places even further away, on our ever-expanding quest for more and more mediocre food.

A Nutty First Week In Squirrel Hill

Our home is about a 35 minute walk from CMU. We're in an area of Pittsburgh called Squirrel Hill. Like the rest of the city, everything here is a bit old and run-down. Squirrel Hill is actually a heavily orthodox Jewish neighborhood, but there are plenty of non-Jews here, too. We're just a block away from Squirrel Hill's main street of Murray Ave, which is packed with pizza places, coffee shops, Asian restaurants--and a Giant Eagle grocery store. The area reminds me a bit of the Porter/Davis areas outside Boston.

Virg took off from work for our first week in Pittsburgh, and we figured we'd use the time to explore our new city together. Instead, the first week proved to be a never-ending flurry of work. This included:

• waiting for the Comcast guy to hook up our Internet
• waiting on the phone with Comcast support after the guy left us with a non-functioning Internet connection
• immediately spending $400 on cleaning supplies, etc., at Target (in a great mega-store shopping area a short drive away called The Waterfront)
• waiting for my car not to arrive Saturday evening
• picking up my car Sunday morning, and returning the rental to the airport (30 mins away)
• looking through stores for desk chairs before buying 2 at Staples (and spending forever trying to remove the glued-on armrests)
• waiting for a delivery guy to drop off Virg's computer, and then waiting the next day for a delivery guy to drop off the piece that Oracle forgot to ship with the computer
• exchanging emails with the landlord (who has been wonderful!) regarding much-needed repairs, painting, and cleaning
• calling the repairman, painters, and cleaners
• waiting around for painters to come by to provide estimates
• waiting for cleaners to come and clean the house
• measuring the den and master bedroom, buying massive rolls of foam padding and massive custom-cut rectangles of carpeting from Lowe's, driving a rental truck full of carpeting back to our place, unloading it, and racing to get the truck back before the store closed
• sweeping/mopping the den and bedroom floors and arranging/cutting foam padding for the carpeting
• looking through several stores for desks and desktop computers for me. Ultimately I bought both at Office Depot (desktop pc - $250, LCD monitor - $200, desk - $50). I'm loving the pc and monitor, but assembling the $50 desk required hours of expletives.

We probably spent $500 a day that week.

Finally, on the Thursday morning marking our one week anniversary of camping out on an air mattress, the moving truck arrived with all our stuff. For this we had to lock the poor frazzled cats in the bathroom for a couple hours. When we finally released them, they practically wept with joy upon seeing all their cat trees, scratching posts, and familiar-smelling furniture. Just a few minutes later, a truck arrived with the guest bed we ordered, and we had to lock up the cats all over again. But at last, the cats got to take over their favorite piece of cat furniture--our bed. They've been lying there blissed out and unconscious for much of the week since then.

And as for us, we were also able to relax when all our stuff arrived. We were particularly thrilled to finally have:

• Our tool box. The first week in a new place is a terrible time not to have tools!
• Telephones. We could finally plug in a phone to try out our new phone line. Turns out, we had a whole bunch of messages about deliveries. Oops.
• Our table and chairs. It's been nice not to have to sit/eat on the floor.
• Music. We used Virg's laptop to play songs off my ipod for a while, but it was wonderful finally having access to our full music collection and real speakers.
• The printer. We could finally print out directions, bus routes, etc.
• Our bed! So big and soft and comfy! It was wonderful to finally get a good night of sleep on our bed, even if we did have to fight the cats for it.

Mr. Moustache Goes To Pittsburgh

And that brings us to Pittsburgh. Virg arrived on a red-eye early on June 12th, rented a car, and got the keys to the house we're renting in Squirrel Hill. I got a ride from Louisville with another CS teacher, arriving in Pittsburgh mid-afternoon.

Fort Pitt Bridge, stolen from Wikipedia

Entering Pittsburgh from the south is actually quite spectacular. First you see nothing but highway traffic. Then you go through the Fort Pitt tunnel that suddenly turns into the Fort Pitt bridge, taking you over the Monongahela River into downtown. The city is surprisingly picturesque, with its downtown located at the intersection of three rivers. The city is also built on a number of hills, and across the rivers are steep slopes which provide some great views looking down on Pittsburgh. And there are numerous bridges that cross the rivers--most of which are painted in an ugly color that you see a lot here. Virg and I refer to it as "Pittsburgh yellow."

the house, as it appeared on Craigslist

Virg and I were initially pretty bummed when we saw the house we rented. We knew it was a 3-bedroom 1.5-bath, and we'd seen photos on Craigslist, but otherwise we had no idea what to expect. It turned out to be an old place with damaged creaky wooden floors everywhere, broken door latches, fingerprints and marks on all the doors and moldings, and it was left absolutely filthy for our arrival. Our socks would turn black after just an hour of walking inside, and we constantly needed to wash our hands. We borrowed an air mattress and set up camp in the upstairs rear bedroom (since it had an AC window unit).

Yes, Virg photographed her sock.

In the evening, we bought a bunch of cat supplies and then used our portable GPS to drive to the Pittsburgh airport's cargo area, where we picked up two terrified cats. Jackie and Mr. Moustache had just survived a week of watching all their stuff disappear, followed by a night in a kennel and then a full day of flying as cargo on United with a connection in Chicago. (Their trip was arranged through Pets Express, an expensive service that provided some big time peace-of-mind for us, as these cats do not travel well!) The cats were too freaked out to protest much on the drive home. We released them in the upstairs bathroom and sat with them there for a while, as they nervously explored the space. When we released them into the rest of the house, they pretty much kept to the bathroom and our makeshift bedroom for the first couple of days. They went right back to hiding in terror each time a repairman, painter, delivery person, etc., came into the house--Jackie hiding under the toilet and Mr. M sprawled out on top of the fridge.

AP Reading

Appropriately, we'll begin this Pittsburgh blog in Louisville, Kentucky. That's where I arrived on June 4th at 3:15am to grade AP Computer Science exams. They gave me a badge to wear that said I was from "The Harker School - CA." Having just turned in my computer and all my keys and departed from CA for good, this didn't sit right. But having not made it to Pittsburgh yet, it definitely felt wrong to put "Carnegie Mellon University - PA" either. I might just has well have put "ETS - KY". I ended up modifying the badge to say "nowhere", which was a good conversation starter.

the people I graded with, as photographed by our fearless captain

Nobody really goes to the Reading to grade--the real draw is the chance to interact with other CS teachers. But I didn't get to do much of either, because I got sick on the first day, and spent most of the week quarantined at my own little table, grading and sneezing alone, and then sneezing and watching TV in my hotel room.

It was a lame Reading all around. The expo center provided us with a grading facility that was just a curtained off section of a large warehouse loading zone (complete with mice). And the food was terrible. One day the main course in the lunch buffet line was literally a potato. It was like working in some sort of forced labor grading camp. Thankfully, next year's promises to be better, as it'll be a short drive to a place in Cincinatti.