How many times a day do you use your microwave?

How often do you unload your dishwasher?

How many loads of laundry do you do?

If you live in an apartment, do you have an elevator?

The first evening we were in our rental apartment in Berlin, I made noodles for the kids on the burners that sat atop an oven that looked about big enough to fit an itty bitty chickling in it. I was going to give an extra little shake of the box (as I always do… you can never have too many noodles in my house) when I realized, hmmmm, there’s no microwave.

HOW DO YOU LIVE WITHOUT A MICROWAVE?

Each night after I made food for us all, I hand washed the dishes. I knew I should make the kids do it (chores and all–you know, keeping it real even on vacation), but I also knew they’d do a horrible job…

…I MEAN, WHO HAND WASHES DISHES ANYMORE THESE DAYS?

I packed lightly for everyone. I thought, hey, we have an apartment. We’ll have a washing machine.

Think again. After about three days, we just wore filthy clothes. So we fit in fine with the “milieu.”

Each day after endless hours walking, the kids still had enough energy to race up the four flights to the apartment. It was a novelty to them that there was no elevator.

They never complained about the lack of amenities. They kind of took it in, nodded sagely, and thought to themselves, thank God we live in America.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.