Sure I've had a house these past few months, in fact unlike other traineeships with AIESEC where you often have to wait a few days before moving in, I was able to go straight from the train station to my house. And yet, I never really felt like I lived there until this week. I had managed to shoo away the hostel/hostile feeling in my room by building a bed and putting up shelves and curtains, but now my room seemed more like a hotel. I still didn't have a kitchen, living room, or TV, and thus came home only to sleep. Even on a weekend I had to go to work or a restaurant to eat something. My apartment couldn't even accommodate the preparation of toast or cereal. But that all changed the day the fridge came home. Me and Levin had always had a sizable bar fridge earmarked for our apartment in the office kitchen, but we had never brought it home. When we finally did, big things happened.
The fridge instantly acted as a catalyst. We had to leave it in the hall which connects all four rooms in our house, because we decided to clean the kitchen floor before putting it in place. Levin brought his speakers out of his room and placed them on top of the fridge, slipped an old Red Hot Chilli Peppers tape in, and we tackled the sizable task of cleaning the kitchen which had apparently served as a garage/closet under the previous administration… We filled a huge bag with the kind of garbage that only an AIESECer accumulates, tiny samplers of perfume, hair dye from Venezuela (ALDS probably) tourist information from Croatia, some as yet undetermined semi-liquid product in tube from Slovenia etc…. I then went to reach for our mop, realized we didn't have one, and added it to our newly minted shopping list while Levin removed a hideous towel he had just placed in the trash and tied it around our broom. I crossed mop off the list. (just kidding)
Now that at least the floor was clean, we moved the fridge into place, placed a couple of Becks that Levin had from home in it, and sat down to build our Ikea furniture. (one table, two chairs) The table was easy enough, the chairs were a little trickier. Not all of the pieces fix quite as well as they might have, and our lack of a hammer resulted in some bruised fists, but in the end we both came up with objects that could easily pass as chairs. Levin was frustrated with his chair which had a decided lilt. We both tried to straighten the legs a little, but to no avail. Finally, in resignation and with a sigh of capitulation, Levin half fell half sat in the chair and with a mighty creak it righted itself. Piece of cake. Feeling that that had been enough work for one night, and seeing as it was nearly midnight on a Tuesday night, we opted to christen the kitchen by emptying our new fridge of its two lonely beers.
The next day was much the same, we came home from the office later than we should have, and continued our campaign to confuse the neighbours by playing loud music and cleaning house in the middle of the night. This time I scrubbed down the bathroom while Levin organized the kitchen and muscled a half pound of rust off the stovetop with steel wool. You can now see your reflection between the burners. And once again we capped off the evening by uncapping two beers we had forgotten about the night before. Now we had an acceptable apartment, or, if you will, a home.
We had taken a break during the working day to swing by the supermarket, buying breakfast and snack food to help fill out the menu at Chez Smith & Ulrich. Levin was especially pleased because he had to drive to Frankfurt the next morning for meetings and would no longer have to first drive to the office to eat breakfast and could thus sleep longer.
The final chapter of this window into my new domestic life illustrates a pattern, see if you pick it up.
The next day, we came home from work late, as usual and sat in the kitchen. Just because we could. Then Levin suggested we have a beer. I didn't think we had any since we had left the office too late to go shopping, but Levin urged me to check. So I opened the fridge door, somewhat hesitantly as Levin was now watching me and stared inside. Much to my surprise, I found two maple leaves staring back at me. Levin had found two bottles of Molson Canadian during his business trip to Frankfurt. That was pretty cool. We started to look around for a bottle opener since the last couple of times we'd used a screwdriver but then remembered that you could just twist the tops off. And so we had a Canadian moment in Germany. Even though Gord Downie's voice filled the room, I was pulled back to my German reality as Levin inquired what 'no preservatives' meant. Clearly not designed for export, the Molson Canadian bottle had 'no preservatives' proudly written on its side. You don't see this on German beer for two reasons, one, because it wouldn't even occur to them to add chemicals here so it's nothing to be proud of. And secondly, because in German a 'preservative' is a condom.
