Europe Journal 1999
Apartment
Here’s my description of our funny little apartment and the street we’re on. It’s a pretty long description, I’m afraid. Summary: the apartment is small but cute, and the street is funny.
The apartment is a riot. It’s on a tourist-packed pedestrian street half a block from the river right in the center or everything – not where we’d live if we were really living here. On this street, which is almost wall-to-wall restaurants, there is an ill-kept dark green door next to a window which was painted green and covered by a heavy screen a long time ago, so it’s dirty. That’s our door. The hallway is as dirty and ill kept, and the apartment is next to an apartment with a yappy dog who barks every time we come home. Once we enter the apartment however, it’s much nicer.
The most striking thing about the apartment is its size – pictures could never convey how small it is. It makes Sabrina’s place look like a palace (my sister, Sabrina, lives in a „one bedroom” apartment in Manhattan which, in Chicago, would be called a studio). The reason it’s so small it that, like Sabrina’s, it was subdivided from a larger apartment. It is a single room, which originally was 12’ high (I used my body as a measure) and roughly square, about 12’x12’. However, it’s been subdivided into a lofted space, with a tiny bathroom less than half the size of Brian Urbaszewski’s (my friend Brian’s bathroom is exactly large enough for a tub, a toilet, and a sink). The ceiling of the lower level is about 6” 8’, but it has rough hewn timbers supporting it (we have seen these timbers in many places – Heinz and Sylvia’s place, for example – but here they cannot possibly be original, and must be the impractical design idea of a short person, though they lend a nice character). The ones against the ceiling only bring the height down to 6’ 3” – just enough for me. However, there are also two big main beams criss-crossing the room , which are about 4” too low for me, so I have to duck to get around.
Of course, upstairs is only about 5’ high, and we both mainly crawl around there. The loft has a decent sized double bed with a bookcase above it, a TV, a little fold-out foam-rubber chair-bed, and a dresser. The dresser has a section for hanging shirts which is only tall enough to hang camisoles. The loft will be good for sleeping.
The loft is L-shaped, with a roughly 6’x6’ cutout in the far corner where the staircase (with its teeny tiny stairs) is. This space is where I can stand up straight and tall and not feel oppressed. In that corner there is a grand window going all the way to the ceiling. Standing in this corner, there is a kitchen in the 6’x6’ quadrant to the right (no oven, just two burners, a sink, a dorm-sized fridge, and a washer-dryer – a single machine that washes and dries clothes!), which has a short window in it (there used to be another grand window here; the upper half of that is now the upstairs bookcase. In the 6’x6’ quadrant to the left is the dining area, with a built in banquette, a table, and two chairs – an excellent use of space, and the banquette benches have storage in them. The 6’x6’ quadrant opposite the staircase is divided in half: half an entrance hallway (the door is there) and half a bathroom.
Enter the bathroom: On the left is the toilette with a hutch over it. In front of you is a sink, a semicircle with an 8” radius, centered 2” past the end of the toilet. The right corner is taken up by the shower, which is about 5” off the ground. I haven’t taken a shower yet, but I stepped in with shoes on and my hair brushed the ceiling.
The place also looks like it was furnished at Ikea, though it doesn’t have the same look as that one hotel – it works pretty well, in fact.
So this is where we will live for the next month. Actually, I like it a lot. It’s got a lot of character. And it’s not permanent.
If the cats lived here, I bet they’d get fat (“studio syndrome) from lack of movement. Plus, where would we put the litter box? There is space under the stairs for storage; it could go there. How big is our neighbor’s place – the one with the yappy dog?
We went out to buy take-out food for dinner, to enjoy in our apartment. We hadn’t noticed before, but our apartment is surrounded by Greek restaurants. In fact, about half of the restaurants in this area of pedestrian streets are Greek. Of the rest, quite a few are Chinese or mixed Asian. In front of many of the restaurants is a man (or occasionally a woman) who calls out to the passing people in whatever language they think is right to try to get them to come in (I heard French, English, and Spanish). You hear everything from “take a look” and “would you like some cous-cous?” to “I have a table for you in here, one table for all of you together, come in and see.” The Greek places around our door all feature men standing and breaking plates on their doorsteps (I’m not kidding – could I make this up?). They break plates and say “c’est formidable! I have table for you!” It’s quite off-putting, but it made me laugh, too. The last place that made me laugh as much was Las Vegas, and this isn’t as funny as Las Vegas, but it’s similar (just on these few streets). So for a month I’ll be avoiding eye-contact as I walk down this circus of a street in the evening. I think it reverts to normal in the daytime, like a werewolf.
So we got some Chinese/Japanese food: assorted steamed and fried appetizers and sushi. It was decent. Perhaps we should have focused on French food, but I felt like having a change. Anyway, we ate it sitting around our little dining-room table, with a glass of red wine (which didn’t suit the food, and was a little fruity anyway – but it was really very good for only $2).