Would You Like a Kitchen with That?
“The Mothership”, as we shall hereafter refer to my Bebezinho’s employer, is a giant German multinational. The biggest of the big. It is so huge t has a factory on the Rhine that is larger than my hometown. For legal reasons (actually, because I don’t know the laws of Germany but I am quite sure they are inflexible, severe, and exceedingly just) I will not disclose the name of the Mothership. Suffice it to say that it is large, German, and thorough.
It approaches the transfers of international workers in the same way. When Bebezinho’s employer (let’s just call her BBZ, it’s easier than typing that out all the time) plucked like an overripe fruit from the wilderness of the Americas, they arranged everything. They bought our house in Jersey City. They set us up with a temporary apartment in Ludwigshafen. They arranged a Patin, or a “Godmother” for us, a woman who would essentially help us navigate the diffuclt patches of our move to Germany. She helped me get my green card. She set us up with health insurance. She helped us look for a house. This was when I knew that things were going to be far stranger than anticipated.
“OK” she asked me at our first meeting. “What exactly are you looking for, ana apartment or a house?”
“I think an apartment.”
“OK. how many bedrooms?”
“Uh, at least two.”
“Ja. Gut. And with a kitchen or without a kitchen?”
“….Huh?”
“Do you want an apartment with a kitchen or without a kitchen.”
“Well, with a kitchen, I guess.”
“That will cost more money.”
“Well I suppose so, but, well, you have to cook, don’t you?”
“You can bring your own kitchen.”
I’m sitting there imagining bolting a kitchen on some sort of platform to the exterior of the apartment when I realize that it has finally happened. I have run up against my first case of linguistic bafflement. Clearly we are not on the same wavelength here. “What exactly do you mean when you ask me if I want a Kitchen” I ask.
It turns out that Germans, when renting an apartment, bring everything with them when they show up, and take everything with them when they leave- including everything in the Kitchen. And I mean everything. Inexorably, when I tell my American friends about this, they ask me “Do you mean they, like, take the stove and stuff?” No. I mean they take everything. The stove. The refrigerator. The cooking range. The sink. Even the countertops. When you walk into a german apartment, the Kitchen is simply a giant, stark, white room with a pipe sticking out of the wall (where you hook up the sink) and a cable sticking out of the wall (where you hook up the stove). That’s it. That’s all, folks.
And it’s not just the kitchen. The first place I saw I assumed had been looted or something. Although the looters had left a remarkeably nice wooden parquet floor behind, and had thoughtfully repainted the apartment a stark and beautiful white whilst patching and resurfacing the masonry German looters would do that, I suppose, as Germans are in the main rather polite (with notable exceptions we’ll get into later). Not only was the kitchen entirely bare, but the apartments usually lack even light fixtures. Wires dangle from the ceiling where lights would usually be. I assumed they were not live wires, but thought it best not to test that theory. Some places have light switched, others don’t.
Also, built in closets do not apparently exist in Germany. It’s true that Germans do spend a great deal of time naked in public (more on that later) but I have seen them with clothes on, so they must have semewhere to put them. They buy giant freestanding closets that they push up against the walls.
Walls which, by the way, are made of concrete. If you want to hang a picture, then you need a masonry drill. but don’t make noise before 9 AM! And definitely not on Sunday. Also, I’ve been told that you shouldn’t make noise between 1 PM and 3 PM, but I’m not sure exactly why. Germans certainly aren’t the sort to take a siesta.
Fortunately the kitchen issue can be solved with a trip to Ikea or MediaMarkt. Ikea has a whole department devoted entirely to selling you modular kitchen elements like cabinets, sinks, and counters. The sizes of such things as stoves and ranges are standardized, so you can mix and match between companies. You can even have an espresso machine built in to your cabinets. As always, these devices from Siemens or Bosch are exquisitely made, and terribly expensive.
I’ve lived in Europe before, right after BBZ and I got married, so I though I had this whole thing down. The concrete walls I was expecting. Since most of the problems with renting a place in Portugal had to do with my size (like special ordering a bed that my feet wouldn’t hang off of) I figured that this would be easier as Germans aren’t small folks. But this is a whole new set of issues.
So, on the 15th, we will be moving into our brand new, totally empty apartment. I will be wiring lights (this may be my last post) and we will have some “engineers” ,as the landlord put it, assist us with the installation of our new Ikea kitchen. Whcih should arrive in about 6 weeks. So I guess it’s bread and water until then.
Still, it could be worse. At least we have a toilet!
