Mar 26, 2014

medieval living

Sunday morning, we rolled out of bed late and grabbed the "Surfer's Breakfast" at a small restaurant featuring glossy, full color menus featuring beachgoer type cool young people like the restaurant was also a Abercrombie and Fitch store. The "surfer's breakfast" was apparently only on sundays, but it did include free drip coffee and orange juice. That was where I first met Lina (apart from a Skype background).

Lina is the daughter of Jens, the architect I'm working for in Stuttgart. I'm not sure how they met, but Saori and Lina became really good friends, despite the fact that Lina is over a decade younger than Saori. Lina was the link who really brought my name in front of Jens, so I am deeply in her debt.

Anyway, the surfer breakfast was good, I ordered a passable jalapenos and eggs, although I suspected that the jalapenos were of the canned variety. Saori and Lina both opted for museli. Not just milk and museli, mind you, but museli mixed with fruit juices, soy milk, honey, and some other strange things. This apparently entirely normal. Germans apparently even eat muslei cereal hot with flax, seeds, etc. There seems to be a national obsession with natural, organic food.

After breakfast we took the S Bahn over to a new apartment which was being shown. Lina tagged along since she was interested, and actually it was helpful to have her along so she could tell us what the broker was telling the other potential buyers.

Renting an apartment here in Stuttgart is tricky. There's more demand then supply, which drives up the price, and the starting costs are astronomical. As opposed to the US, where you pay to have a credit check, there's no credit check here. Instead, the standard is to put down a 3 month deposit (invested into a secure, separate account the landlord/lady can't touch), plus a 2 month rent commission fee to the apartment broker. You will have to pay the first month's rent in advance anyway, so before you even walk through the front door, you're putting down six months worth of rent.

If it turns out you're not paying the rent, then they have three months of rent to draw from while they evict you. The fact that many of the apartment brokerages want to have at least a two year commitment to lease actually makes sense in light of the 2 month rent brokerage costs.

Anyway, after looking over the apartment, we went to Moulu for coffee, a small coffee shop close to Fueresee in one of the more picturesque older neighborhoods of Stuttgart. We chatted and drank bowls of hot coffee before seeing Lina off for work (even though it wasn't open for business, the clothing store where she works was doing inventory).

From there, Saori and I meandered through the town to the Kunsthalle art musuem, a giant glass cube hovering over an underground permenent collection gallery. There's a restaurant on the top floor which I've heard is the best place to get a view of city at night.

After the art museum, I left Saori at Starbucks and went up to meet Ben, the guy who I'd been dealing with for the rental room up on Zepplinstr. Ben is an interesting character, a student of book preservation who dabbles in bookbinding and illuminated manuscripts, white as the Bavarian alps, and with light blond dreadlocks. He sat down with me and we wrote up the room rental contract for me and the landlady to sign. He also showed me a book he made based on a medieval traveling book used by civil officials.

The book covers were made of 1.5 cm thick oak, and wrapped in leather which extended off of the bottom of the book by a few feet to end in a woven knot around a fist-sized river stone. This serves two purposes- the first is that you can slip the book under your belt and the stone works both to act as a counterweight and to keep the book from slipping out. So you can walk along with the book cinched tight, and then when you need it, you can lift up the stone and get some slack in the leather to read the book. Or you can use it as a nasty weapon. This is the middle ages after all.

Anyway, after the contract stuff, we headed down the hill and back to the apartment to cook a light dinner. Oh, and saturday, I got a chip for the iphone so I now have a local German number. Dear America: it took me ten minutes and ten dollars to get a chip for an iphone and I started making calls immediately: why aren't people demanding the destruction of the medieval telephone guilds?

A bit more on Saori's apartment: Saori lives on one of the upper floors of a very old apartment building, along with two other people, S, and F. S is in her forties and works as a translator for a translation company. She enjoys her job since the work she does is for high tech companies and there's a lot of work to translate scientific, burocratic, and engineering documents. She loves to talk, and thinks that Germany is not actually a sovereign country, but a puppet state under US/Allies control per a secret treaty after WWII. She is actually quite nice and I've enjoyed chatting (mostly listening) with her as she puffs on an e-cigarette in the narrow kitchen.

F is a Turkish gentleman in his late 30s, early 40's, who is also very nice, but his English is not all that good. It's still better than my German! He's also learning chinese to keep his friend company who is also taking the class. He's lived here for many years working as an engineer. The other night, the two of them made a big pot of vegetable soup that we all shared.

The apartment is tight. The square footage is about the same as my apartment in St. Louis, but with an extra bedroom squeezed in. There's not a living area, but a separate living room which S uses as a smoking lounge. The door opens into a kind of wide hallway foyer which the other rooms open onto.

The kitchen has a small table, but is comfortably and charmingly tight. I'm sitting here at this small table with four narrow wooden chairs, listening to to the tankless water heater kick on above the sink. Out the window, there is a balcony and a view across the bowl of the city of Stuttgart (Saori's apartment is up towards the ridges around the city).

The bathoom is also very narrow, probably less than three feet wide. In fact, it is so narrow, that the bowl of the toilet is turned 90 degrees so it faces the door. You have to squeeze past it to get to the shower. The shower, at least, feels a little more generous and the water gets hot quickly, stays hot, and the shower retains its heat when you shut off the supply. Hot water makes any bathroom luxurious.

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I moved the blog again. I deleted the Tumblr account and moved everything to Medium.com, a more writing-centric website. medium.com/@wende