Kitchen adventures

As some of you probably know already, flats and houses in Germany don't always come with kitchens. I've been told that the majority of Germans rent rather than own flats/houses, but this doesn't quite mean the same thing as it might in other countries. German flats--even rented ones--are very individualised. Whereas in Australia we would phone the landlord if a burner on our ancient stove stopped working, here we moved into a flat that literally didn't even have a kitchen sink. We spent our first few weeks here washing our borrowed dishes (for, of course, our stuff hadn't arrived yet) in the bathroom sink, and even after our stuff arrived we just set up our dish drainer in the bathtub for more effective washing until a friend helped us get a sink and bench unit from the Ikea down the road, and until Ikea delivered us a brand new oven. Which, naturally, didn't come installed, and so we had to enlist the help of another friend's very handy husband. Very, very interesting times.


In Germany, for example, you can put your seven year-old on a ladder and have her paint flowers on a bedroom wall.

Our kitchen, unsurprisingly, turned out to be Not Very Great. The layout was terrible, the sink stood away from the wall, and the tiny bench space was made up of two benches which, for some reason, had wheels. I'd tried my best, but none of my plans factored in things like specific points for the sink and oven, and only one reasonable spot for the fridge. The furniture was cool, but turned out not to fit with the layout, and we ended up with our cups, plates, and baking stuff in the living room. Funny, but annoying, and it didn't make life easy.

My favourite neighbours moved away on the weekend, and their parting gift to us was their kitchen. They didn't even want it, but since the real estate didn't know if the next tenants would want it (I don't see how this would even be a question--I'd've chosen quite happily to take somebody else's kitchen rather than buy my own!--but there you have it) they were required to remove it and asked if we wanted it. Yes, please! So we've spent the weekend and today wandering around bits of kitchen bench in various areas of my house. It's surprisingly fun, especially because there's a handyman doing all the work and I just get to admire it and clean up the dust.

The funniest parts came tonight, upon finding out that the real estate (or German equivalent) were meant to be coming for the keys tomorrow. My friends' apartment is not finished, or so I think, and their oven was still in their flat. With the handyman not coming here until midday tomorrow you can imagine that we were a bit flustered. My friends had left things for other people, and I choreographed this quite merrily. Here's the fridge, isn't it lovely, the washing machine is here and all the water has been let to drain. I'll mop this spill off the floor so it still looks nice, and et cetera. It all went quite spiffingly until I got a call from my German-speaking upstairs neighbour. My German is getting better but it's still not great, and a wrong word meant that hilarity ensued.

The handyman had left the oven with all its electrics stuck into the wall, which of course presented a little problem. I tried to let her know that the oven was still in the kitchen, but unfortunately said gekocht (cooked) rather than geguckt (looked). A little note here: when you say 'guck' (look) the g sounds like a k. So basically I said gekocht rather than gekuckt. I don't know if they look at all similar here, but they sound very similar to me.

My upstairs neighbour freaked out a little. "What do you mean, you cooked there?"

"No no no," I tried to explain. Then said the same thing. I tried to qualify it with examples, in my terrible German, but she wasn't buying it. "I cooked with my eyes," I told her earnestly. "Like, I cooked at a football game. Or I cooked at my children playing. I cooked at the stove." She made a worried noise and went to speak to her husband before calling me back very concerned about my odd confession of cooking in an otherwise empty apartment that wasn't my own. The only way I was able to regain her trust was to take her over there and mime what I'd done otherwise, I fear, she might have spent the rest of our time as neighbours thinking I was truly insane.

Tangential and I waited a while for a phone call, received instructions on how to go about removing ovens from walls, and set off, perhaps inadvisedly, under the cover of darkness to retrieve the stove before the Wohnung/real estate people came to take back their keys.

We figured out the oven. Well, my husband figured out the oven while I leaned over the stove and shone spotlights from both our mobile phones in the general direction of the back of the stove. Then we figured out the best way to carry it so that it could be stowed in our basement for the new owner. This is where the cover of darkness didn't really work in our favour. Not that it isn't getting dark now at 4pm, but that's entirely beside the point--it took us until we gathered a small audience of very suspicious neighbour before we realised how dodgy it looks for two people dressed in black (winter jackets, naturally) and wearing gloves (because who'd move furniture without them when it's 3 degrees?) to be wandering through the quiet neighbourhood at 9pm with an obviously purloined stove. My husband, bless his heart, thought to call out to put fears to rest, but alas my husband's company's German course still hasn't started and his command of the language isn't quite good enough to reassure anybody! Not only were we dodgy black-clad gloved people skulking around with a stove at 9pm, we were also foreigners. I'm surprised the police haven't shown up yet.

At long last we got the stove into our basement, ready to be picked up. I've got new, shiny cupboards in my kitchen, most of my dishes out of the dining room, 21 types of tea, and a handyman coming tomorrow to finish the job. Quite a satisfying day. Really, where else could I possibly live that would see me with a spare kitchen sink in my hallway?