apartment

Hoe spel je dat

Brooke, , Leave a comment

Forget periods, bar mitzvahs, or the legal voting age, I think I became an adult when I started dreading getting mail.

There is nothing worse than a bunch of sealed envelopes filled with notes form people I might have to pay or may have already paid, mixed in with sealed envelopes filled with advertisements and sealed envelopes filled with scams, mixed in with the occasional sealed envelope with a letter from my grandmother in it. I have a vague memory of mail being all about getting birthday cards full of money, but now I mostly get birthday cards from former dentists and they never have money in them, just notes about how a birthday is a good time to schedule an annual cleaning.

In Portland I would wait so long to check the mail that the mailman (he was a man, I met him) would sort through it and throw away my junk mail, to make more space in the mailbox. I thought this was a service USPS provided that everyone made use of, but a few people have told me I was wrong about that.

I also thought moving would be a way to escape mail, but apparently I was wrong about that too. There is just as much mail. The only difference is now all of it is in a language we can’t read.

When a piece of mail arrives here I can tell it’s going to be about one of the following things:

Just kidding I don’t have a clue what it’s about!

It could be a bill, it could be an insurance form, a ransom note, a contest entry, a poem, a bank statement, or an invitation to a birthday party.

I don’t even know which part of the letter is the salutation: I just realized this week that the word I thought was the name of our insurance company is actually just the word for “city.” Or it can also mean township or village, or just an area people live in.

This week I needed to mail a form to a museum and I didn’t really understand any of the form, but it seemed to say I could put it in an envelope, write the address on the envelope, and then put the envelope in a mailbox with no stamp. That seemed ridiculous, so I wrote the address and then went to buy a stamp. As I was about to put the stamp on, the woman I’d bought the stamp from glanced over at my envelope and said that address didn’t need a stamp.

Weird, I told her, that’s the same thing the form inside this envelope said.

“This word is how you know” she said, pointing to a ten-syllable word that looked like all the other words on the envelope.

So there you go. Now I have a stamp in my pocket that I’m saving for later.

I’m not sure how to end this except to say that if someone gives you three wishes today and you have one to spare, and you use one to wish that we get less mail, I will be forever indebted to you. I will not miss those birthday cards from any of my former dentists, I will not miss the sealed envelopes full of advertisements, and I will not miss the mail we’re getting now, whatever it is.

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Sometimes it’s nice out lately, here’s a photo.

A pet with a job

Brooke, , , 2 Comments

 

The world tells you that there are only two types of people: cat people and dog people. My family has a dog, so cats aren’t my thing.

mcgee
This is McGee

Bu that changed a few weeks ago when my colleague Teresa told me about her cat – she and her roommate got him because they had mice in their apartment. Cats in Amsterdam are like children a hundred years ago. People have them not because they’re cute and they love them, but because there is work to be done.

And I don’t know why it was that idea that got me into cats, but it was. I want a cat. A pet with a job.

Teresa says her cat doesn’t even need to kill mice, its presence alone scares the mice away.

I wanted nothing more than an apartment with mice so that we could get a cat who could scare the mice away using only its natural musk or a well-timed look or hiss. But we moved into an apartment four floors up from the street, and it seemed unlikely.

Then I came downstairs one morning and found a miracle on the counter – a mouse poop.

Maybe. It seemed too good to be true so we investigated it from all angles with the flashlight function on my phone. Was it actually a chocolate sprinkle? Part of a cookie? A sliver of a chocolate bar? A rolled up little ball of Nutella? If you’d lived with me you would know all of those are more likely than mouse poop. Chocolate crumbs line the pockets of every jacket and backpack I have, and every time I get a new jacket or backpack I say this time it’s going to be different, this is going to be the one that doesn’t get lined with chocolate, but a few weeks later it’s too late. Most of my favorite foods are the color of mouse poop. So we sort of assumed it was chocolate, cleaned the counter, and forgot about it until a few hours later.

That’s when I found the mouse door, because there’s no other word for it. Behind the trash can in the kitchen (don’t ask why I was looking there because I can’t remember) is a tiny mouse door, straight out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and all around the door were more  tiny brown things that at this point couldn’t be sprinkles.

We have a mouse! Why don’t other wishes come true this quickly?

We haven’t started looking for a pet with a job yet – because the real reason I’m a dog person is I’m incredibly allergic to cats, and so is Boaz. We won’t be getting a cat until after scientists invent some kind of surgery we can get.

But I don’t regret wishing for a mouse. So far she’s an unobtrusive roommate, and Boaz pointed out that a mouse is worlds better than cockroaches. In high school I slept in a room with slugs, and our last apartment had so many ants that we could feel them in our scalp and they crawled all over us in the shower, filled the insides of our clean socks, and swam in our milk. A mouse is also better than bedbugs, and snakes, and hand-sized spiders. A mouse is better than a lot of things.

And what if she’s scaring away the cockroaches? Maybe we have a pet with a job after all.

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Image: het muizen huis

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This is McGee on his birthday. I’ll add a photo of the mouse on her birthday as soon as we figure out when that is.

Downstairs penthouse

Brooke, , , , , , 1 Comment

One morning a few weeks ago Boaz and I had two appointments to look at apartments.

The first place was just a couple blocks from work and a confident man with ear-length black hair showed it to us. He was wearing a gray v-neck t-shirt, jeans, and the green Stan Smiths everyone on earth is required to wear this year.

It wasn’t a great apartment, and the bathroom smelled like something bad had happened in there that the entire building would need years to recover from. Boaz thanked him and we walked to the next place, which was a 30 minute walk south.

We checked the address, rang the bell, and I swear the same realtor opened the door. He told us he had a different name, and he gave us a different business card, but how did he get there before us? Did he take the tram? It was the same guy.

This apartment was on the ground floor. In Amsterdam lots of apartments are on the ground floor. And unlike a ground floor apartment in Portland or any other American city I’ve lived, there is no yard giving you a few feet of space between your living room and passers by. My nose is inches away from a Dutch family sitting down to dinner, a boy petting a cat, a guy laughing at something on his laptop, a couple making out on a sofa.

A ground floor apartment is essentially drawing a chalk line on the sidewalk and saying the general public needs to be on this side of the line, but we’re all going to be sort of sharing the space together.

The upside of ground floor apartments is you can set up things in your windows for people to look at, or even touch. I mean really people are right there, I don’t know how to explain that I am not exaggerating a little bit about this.

When we tried to tell the realtor that we weren’t interested, he didn’t let us leave as easily as he’d let us leave the other apartment. Everyone in Amsterdam would kill for a ground floor apartment, he told us. In America sure, you want the penthouse. But here no one wants to go up and down with the bags and the bikes. You walk in, you’re home.

You’re lucky to find this ground floor, he said. And I’m sure he was lying.

But was he?

Now every time I’m walking somewhere and I accidentally make eye contact with someone sitting just inches away from me in a ground floor apartment I think of those realtors who are identical twins and I want to ask the people inside what the real story is. I wish I had a little sign I could hold up in ground-floor windows. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR APARTMENT? IS THIS A HIGHLY-COVETED FLOOR TO BE ON? THUMBS UP FOR YES.

I might wait until I know a little more Dutch.

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I haven’t taken any photos into people’s ground-floor apartments (you’re welcome) so here’s a photo of a light bulb store sign that I like.

The licorice tea box says you’re not supposed to drink it every day.

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Our temporary one-month apartment in Amsterdam is furnished with enough things to get by, and enough things to make the things it’s not furnished with really stand out.

The apartment comes with three cutting boards, but no paring knife.

The apartment comes with floor cleaner, counter cleaner, toilet cleaner, dish detergent, laundry detergent, but no hand soap.

The apartment comes with dishes, but instead of mugs it has tiny little teacups the size (but not shape) of golf balls.

If a higher power designed dishes instead of animals and planets, all teacups would be the exact size of the tiny ones in our temporary apartment. That way I wouldn’t drink half a gallon of licorice tea before going to sleep, and then wake up twice in the night. But licorice tea is delicious, so I just refill the golf-ball sized teacups many times, or line up a few cups of licorice tea and drink little tea shots, like someone at a crazy college party with the queen.

There’s also a small saucepan with a lid, and also a large lid for a large pot, but no large pot. The large lid to the nonexistent large pot keeps me up at night, when licorice tea doesn’t. There must have once been a pot. And that lid knows what happened, but it will never tell.

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Birds on a railing, this has nothing to do with temporary apartments.