EuroLife: Day 27

Interior Spaces

This might look like a picture of our bed, but actually its a picture of our bed-room. The bed just got in the way. It does, after all, take up most of the room. Of course there is much to say in favor of our bed. It is very comfortable. It came from Ikea, and thus has a certain Scandinavian chic. It was free. Finally, you can't blame the bed for the size of the room.

Our apartment here is 50 square meters, or approximately 450 square feet, though it feels much smaller due to poor design. Probably a fourth of our floor space is taken up by a rather useless entry way and a long hallway.

There is much more to say about our apartment, about how we got it, and about why, despite its small size, we fell so blessed to have it. I had intended to fill today's blog with the story of how we found this place, but I have decided, instead, to tell the story of our rainy Sunday afternoon, a story that, in its own way, says something about our four-hundred and fifty feet of personal space.

Sunday morning is church. This means a forty minute walk to the south side of town. Today there was a fine mist, and I kept opening and closing my umbrella. After the walk there is a service that usually lasts about two hours, and then there is an hour of coffee and conversation. We often speak German with the natives, though I fear a small English language ghetto may be forming. There are a number of English speakers -- Laura, an American who is here with a teaching Fulbright; Kirstin, a British woman from York, who is here for a year as an exchange student; Rose, a student from Ghana who is getting her masters in ecology; Jeff Davis, who works with the Student Baptist group in Jena and who lives here with his wife three children; and Scott, an American who has worked here for seven years and is now engaged to a German woman. After church, we make the forty-five minute walk home, often accompanied by friends who live in our part of town.

Thus Sunday mornings usually pass in an agreeable fashion. The afternoons, I predict, will present some difficulties, particularly now that winter weather has more or less arrived. The ran has come, and tonight the temperature will dip below freezing. This poses a problem: what to do on the short rainy afternoons and the long cold evenings of our winter Sundays. It isn't simply the winter weather that makes this problem acute; it is, as much as anything, a problem that stems from our small living quarters.

We have a couch where we sit to eat our meals. Soon we will have money for a table, o glorious day. We use the same couch for surfing the net, playing our one board game -- a mildly diverting game of strategy called Blokus -- and for reading. For a a change of scenery, we can go sit on one of the chairs, lay on the bed, or sit in a warm bath.

For those long indoor days, a change of scenery often makes the difference between a pleasant afternoon and the loss of your sanity. If you get bored reading history in the office, you read a novel in the sun room. If you get bored playing Scrabble in the dinning room, you play Go in the living room. Ah, those were the days -- the days when we had a sun room and an office, before our living room, kitchen, and dining room became fused into one unholy amalgam.

Sometimes an illustration is helpful. Here are two pictures form our old apartment. First, imagine me bored in the picture on the left. I'm reading a history book -- maybe something on Andrew Jackson or the House of Morgan. And I'm bored. Sounds like a problem, right? Wrong. I put down my book on Andrew Jackson; I grab a novel, something by Fitzgerald perhaps; and then I go to the sun room, pictured on the left. Problem solved. Or maybe, to put the whole scenario in positive terms, I wake up in the morning and have my coffee in the office, where the morning sun comes streaming in. Then, at the end of the day, I sit in the sun room enjoying the sun set. Yes, those were the days -- windows on both sides of our apartment!

So you can see the problem we are up against. By three-thirty this afternoon, we had eaten lunch, drunk tea, eaten chocolate, taken a nap (me, not Dolores), drunk coffee, played a game of Blokus, checked email, and we were running out of things to do. Dolores broke down first. I'm bored she said. My thoughts exactly. It was like she had read my mind. I wasn't just bored, though. I had that I'm antsy and anxious because I've been inside to long but I don't have the concentration to do anything feeling. At night, I can read or amuse myself indoors for hours, but in the day sometimes it just doesn't work.

Well, just when we thought things couldn't get any worse, a solution came. Two solutions really, one for Dolores and one for me. Stephie called Dolores on Skpye, and they had a lovely conversation complete with web cam. Dolores always finds simple solutions for problems like this. Not me. My solutions are always more complicated.

I had noticed a break in the clouds. The rain had stopped, and so I headed out for the mountaintop. In the states I went to the pool or the gym when I felt restless. So far we don't have the funds for a gym membership, and the pool is only open for free swim on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Plus, its an expensive twenty minute street car ride from here. So instead I find myself heading out three or four times a week for the top of Landgrafen, the mountain closest to our apartment. I walk as fast as I can, and in ten minutes I reach the mountain. After ten more minutes of steep climbing my heart races at a hundred and sixty beats a minute, my lungs burn from the cold air, and the endorphins are cranking through my brain and clearing out all the murky thoughts.

After a series of narrow switchbacks I arrive at a ridge. I can see our street in the distance. I continue along the ridge amidst the brilliant yellow leaves as it slopes up towards the open plains above the city. The plains are rocky with short grass. The harsh wind and landscape always reminds me of King Lear upon on the heath. Today the effect was more dramatic than usual. The mountains had already brought a premature twilight to the valley of Jena. However, when I broke out through the trees I could see the sun unimpeded, shining from the East. From the North there were more storm clouds coming down the valley fast. The first wisps were already flowing around the hills directly across the valley.

There were only a few of us out on the mountain plain -- a few people walking dogs, one man jogging, a couple holding hands. We shared the view and a sense of camaraderie because we few had managed to seize the brief opening in the weather, the forty minutes of sun shine.

As I started down the mountain it started to rain. The sun was gone. I was wet, but I was happy. I was looking forward to the warmth of our apartment.