Arrived
We found a place. I'm almost a bit afraid to say too much about it as the (for us) perfect apartment seems to have dropped in our laps, literally and those things don't really happen. Not in realy life at least. On the other hand this seems to just fall in place with the otherwise incredibly serendipitous course of this entire move. More on that some other time, but the distance between how it all could have happened and how it actually did is about a trillion miles long.
We found the apartment on first try. The first Saturday we had assigned to looking at apartments, I had two lined up and saw this one the morning of and quickly added it to the itinerary - by chance ahead of the other two. We spend 45 minutes looking at it. Another 45 minutes talking about it afterwards and then called the owner to say we wanted it. We had not seen anything else at that point. This is crazy behavior, except it would be crazier to not take it simply because one hasn't seen another 200 apartments. It has all the things that were really important to us plus a bunch of bonuses. Here goes in no particular oder:
- 4 bedrooms (FOUR!)
- separate kitchen from the living room (I'm tired of the kitchen/living room combo)
- kitchen fits a small table for every day meals
- new kitchen incl. appliances
- hardwood floors everywhere
- it's an old apartment, newly renovated, we are the first ones to live in it after the complete renovation
- the master bedroom and living room have french glass doors (Ah!)
- neighboorhood has everything in close walking distance
- giant park nearby (Baroque gardens and stuff...)
- elementary school at the end of the street
- church around the corner
- subway station a two-minute walk away
- rent was 3 euro under our limit (a crazy good price for what we get)
The only thing this place lacks is an elevator and we are on the fourth floor. This is a bit strenuous and probably explains the favorable rent, but given the rest we did not care one bit. I might reconsider this once I have to start lugging groceries up there, but I also know that the chance of finding a place like this for the price we did was nearly impossible, so elevator? Bah. The owner does want to put one in, so who knows... Another issue for me is the lack of storage, which is a stark contrast to lots of American apartments were built-in closets are standard, so we will have to invest in a lot of wardrobe type furniture in the future. Still nothing that would have deterred us.
We had considered briefly to try to find a place with a yard, which is very hard to find and usually very expensive. I looked into it, but having a yard which would fit our budget would mean living in the outskirts to the point where we needed a car... which goes directly against our plan of not having a car. This will sound funny to American ears (who lives without a car?), but we figure this is our only chance. We are certainly strongly influenced by the fact that we don't have money to buy one, but it's also something we are both looking forward to. We have driven all the time in the last few years, we were 100% dependent on cars and left so much money at the repair shop and the gas station that not having a car to take care of sounds like a vacation itself. Living in a city also makes parking a huge and costly problem... I was resentful enough to have to buy the car new parts all the time and now to pay for its very own house? No, thanks. We do plan to drive, Vienna offers short-term and long-term rental places for people just like us.
And so we will be city people now it seems. We are moving tomorrow into a big mess, but I can't wait.
From scratch
I got married in the spring of 2000, about a week or so after graduating college. A week after the wedding I moved to another continent. That meant, I went from a single Europen student semi-living with her parents (adjacent apartments) to a working wife in an American small town within a month. You can say I am familiar with change. Everything I know about being a wife and mother in practical terms, like where to shop for what, how to cook for two and how to cook for kids and what recipes fit for what occasion is deeply colored in stars and stripes. I now "returned" to Austria, but in many ways it certainly doesn't feel like returning since very few things from my previous life here remain.
For example, I am now having a hard time using the recipes I've accumulated over those ten years. Anything Mexican or Mexican inspired is mostly out. Seafood is in very low supply. Some recipes will work but then there is one ingredient not available and I just don't bother. I will have to build a new repertoire here, which I'm also excited about, but on some days I wonder why keep doing this to myself every ten years...
One of the things I had brought along to the US and - thought at least - I kept was my love for eating and making desserts. In that order. When it comes to desserts, I will always proudly say I am from Austria. In the sweets department, we've got everyone beat. I remember, shortly before the wedding, Lincoln sent me an email saying his mother wanted to know what cake we prefered for the wedding reception, the one she was planning for all the American relatives and friends who couldn't make it to Austria to the wedding. He wrote: "Yellow, white or chocolate"? A perfectly normal question for an American. But I wasn't, so I started laughing, typing back: "What do you mean? What is a yellow cake? Tons of cakes and tortes are yellow. What is a white cake? Are there only three kinds of cake (PANIC) in the US?" I thought there must be some kind of confusion. Who calls a cake by its color? What about other dishes? "Did you want your meat square, round or oval? Would you like a yellow, green or brown side with that? " What nonsense. Silly Americans.
Lincoln ended up making that decision. Once we moved it all became clear within a few weeks. Not that I still didn't think it was strange. I was used to different categories, all cakes had names, like Black Forest Cake, which exists in the US as well, or Sachertorte or Bananenschnitte or whatnot. I just could not see the point of this color coding. Nevertheless I embraced American baking... cookies, brownies, cinnamon rolls. I do not discriminate on principle.
Back to now. I was planning Veronika's birthday party, which was to take place at my sister's, who has a big yard. I asked Veronika what kind of cake she wanted and she said she was fine with anything. I found myself poring over different Austrian recipe books, unable to find what I wanted. Something simple, no frills, moist, one kind of frosting. Stuff kids will eat. Turns out I didn't want an elaborate Altwiener (old Viennese) monster of a cake with complicated creams that take 15 steps and cake batters that need to be wined and dined in order to behave. After looking through all the books of my mom's extensive selection I realized what I really wanted was YELLOW CAKE. With chocolate frosting. And I went to Allrecipes and launched the browser (All my American recipe books are currently on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic) and grabbed the highest rated yellow cake and a semi-Ganache (half butter, half cream plus chocolate) and whipped up that yellow cake. There. All my European snootiness wiped out by ten years of American reeducation. All the kids ate it with delight.
And now what? The point of this story is nothing except that I love discovering these bits and pieces of change, past and current. They are souvenirs, like the sand in your toes the day after you got home from vacation. It's comforting. I was there and it stuck to me.