I know I know I know I was supposed to tell you about the rest of our trip to Italy. Like, last week. The thing is, I got distracted with all types of work and home projects, and then, then, two guys showed up with tens of Ikea boxes that would eventually become a storage system for most of the stuff we own. It was Florence against finally getting settled in our new apartment in Munich, and, well… Italy got the boot. The good news is that we are now one kitchen table away from a real home. Not a hotel, not a half-time home, but a real home. And a real life. Aaaaaamen.
In practical terms, this means that you can find fruit in the fruit bowl, books on the bookshelf, socks in all the right places, and even herbs growing on the itty bitty balcony. (We are, by the way, in a secret balcony-scaping competition with the neighbors. We think our mini cypress tree just might put us over the edge, figuratively speaking.) The living room is as zen as it’s ever going to be. The washing machine is in the bathroom, but that’s totally normal in these parts. Then there’s the fun stuff, like the occasion-based category management exercise otherwise known as organizing the kitchen. I like the idea of putting the coffee machine, coffee cups, and coffee all together in the same cupboard, for example, rather than keeping all of the dishware together in one place. Husband is baffled, thinks it’s all a big trick. Like I said: fun stuff.
The really baffling thing about kitchens in Munich apartments, though, is that they usually don’t exist. I mean, when you rent a place, it doesn’t come with a kitchen. Or closets. (Hence the storage system.) Or light fixtures. For an American, the idea that people take their kitchens with them when they move out is just too weird. Right? I understand the desire to customize, and I think that Germans rent for longer periods of time on average, but still. Kitchen transport? I’m half expecting to see someone walking down the street with a sink strapped to his back one of these days.
As for the light fixtures, we have enough freestanding lamps, so what to do with the big old-school hooks hanging from the ceilings was a big question for awhile. Then we realized that we had some hanging plants on hand. See where I’m headed? Needless to say, if you try to walk directly through two rooms in particular, you will find yourself in a tangle of ivy. We somehow find this—for a limited time, I imagine—extremely entertaining.
We’ve also started to learn about the joys of Altbau. When you’re shopping for apartments, you fall in love with the rustic floors and high ceilings that attend a 100-year-old building. Once you move in, though, you notice other things. Like, the easiest way to heat the place is to put on a sweatshirt. Your exit of any room—like it or not—will be punctuated by a slamming door, and 90-degree angles definitely aren’t a given. Hanging pictures is an unsolvable geometry problem. You can choose whether to align with the floor or the door frame. As it sometimes goes in life, you just can’t do both.
Which, of course—true to form—leads me back to Italy. I could have told you about Florence, or unpacked those boxes. One or the other. Italy lost the last round, but we’ll see how it fares against the Kaiserschmarrn recipe that I’ve been dying to share with you ever since the movers packed up my mixer and made the very notion irrelevant. If I can now find it, and the ingredients—in the dessert section of the kitchen, past all that ivy—it may push back Italy yet again. Either way, I promise promise promise the next post will be a treat!
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Every posting is a treat. Love you.
Happy to hear you are unpacked and settled in…enjoy your new home