Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Has it been that long already?

45 days 2 hours 14 minutes and 3 seconds. Not that I'm counting.

We arrived at our current residence about a week after getting off the airplane. It's a rental apartment, just like the rental we had in the Bronx..or so you may think. Aside from the obvious differences, tile floors instead of wood panels, a built in safe room that is so good it's even air tight...perfect in case of an anthrax attack, not as good when your trying to breathe in the room for more than 4 minutes.

But then there were the big differences. First, there are no built in closets. none. the only storage you have is a room in the basement. Now, I guess that allows for more living space in the apartment itself, but then again it can get annoying. "Honey, I'm in the bathroom and we ran out of toilet paper, can you pass me another roll?" "no problem, let me just go down 5 flights to the basement while carrying our daughter and dig through the storage room to try to find where we put them, I'll be back in an hour."
Shower doors is another item we took for granted. In our beautiful master bathroom we have a shower head, a WC and a sink. The only problem is nothing separates them. The advantage is that while I'm waiting for the roll of toilet paper I can take a shower without even standing up.
Oh, and the kitchen doesn't come with any appliances. No fridge, no oven, no stove. Talking to my neighbors I found out that we were lucky that we had cabinets installed that already had a hole cut into them for the stove. A real win for us.

So we get to our apartment the day before we want to move in, just to get a real look at it since all we had seen until this point were online pictures. It happens to be a really nice flat (i've been befriending too many Brits). But we couldn't actually see the floors or walls since it was covered with dirt. Mind you, this is the holiest dirt on Earth, dirt from Israel. But that just wasn't doing it for us at that moment.

We got over it, and things are shaping up (and by that i mean, i have internet, tv, and telephone from two countries).

By the way, i haven't had a chance to yell at all of you Americans yet, but what is going on? i leave for a month and the economy falls apart? I'm watching from thousands of kilometers away as my savings, investments, retirement funds, and worst of all exchange rate plummet. Whether you choose that old guy and his woman, or the black dude, just make sure they get the money flowing again....oh I'm sorry, that's offensive, the old "MAN" and the woman , or the Black "MAN". Sorry about that, we progressive types that live in countries that already broke those barriers (and will likely do it again this year) don't think much about the terminology.

Next up:
first installment of "Good Idea/Bad Idea"