Surfing around on kayak.com for affordable destinations for my planned, hopefully then-deserved post-master’s-thesis vacation, I browsed through the list of travel destinations, glancing over Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, ….

Wait a minute. Cuba?

Sure enough I was curious, so I clicked it and got the following message.

Ah. Everything’s still in order, the trade embargo hasn’t been lifted without my knowledge, Pennsylvania liquor stores are still safe from the invasion of evil Cuban rum, cigar stores can still sell Dominican cigars with the slogan “taste almost like Cubans” with only mildly ridiculing themselves, and kayak.com saved itself from committing treason at the last minute. Phew, time to dry the sweat off my face.

That went quite quick: I looked at two places and the second one was good enough so I took it. It’s a little room in Squirrel Hill, furnished and with air condition (believe me, that is important here). I even have an own bathroom. (And, as I mentioned earlier, I have decent cable TV that allows me to watch Euro 2008 soccer — yay for the landlady!)

At the moment however I live in a different room of the house because the current person to live in my room-to-be will only move out on July 15.

Either way, I am happy to have found a place to stay.

Murray Avenue, Squirrel Hill’s main street (picture off Wikipedia)

By the way, the neighborhood is really nice, there are a lot of families living there, it’s very close to amenities (grocery store, restaurants, post office, even a liquor store) and it’s a really short walk to the bus stop too.

Looks like I’m all set — Now I only need to write my master’s thesis. Peanuts!

There’s no question about it: This is the street I need to move to.

Or at the very least I need to go there and take a photo

Sadly, the Pittsburgh Penguins lost their game against the Detroit Red Wings last night. Watching the game downtown was fun nonetheless. Plus, while during the course of the game it became quite apparent that the Red Wings are the stronger team, at the very end the Pens put a tremendous effort into tying the game to get into overtime and they almost made it! In the last second of the game, the puck was literally *on* the Red Wings’ goal line.

I also got myself a t-shirt with the Pens’ captain’s name on it (Sidney Crosby) — I mean, when in Rome…

Here are three pictures I took with my crappy cellphone cam (click on them to see the larger version):