Electrical outlets and abbreviations: Apartment living in Munich
I live in a one-and-a-half room apartment. In it, there are six electrical outlets. To some, this would seem adequate for a small place, but consider the outlets’ locations. My dollhouse-sized bathroom has one socket to the left of the sink (the right side would have been the logical choice) where it is not possible to squeeze between the sink, door and bathtub to dry my hair. The two outlets in the kitchen are even more ridiculously situated. The one near the stove is directly over the back burners. This means you can’t cook and have anything plugged in or the cord will fry. On the opposite wall, the outlet is an inch from the ceiling. I have to climb onto the counter to plug in my toaster. The two sockets in the living room are fine, but that’s the problem, there are only two. The TV has a plug, and my cordless phone has a plug, but everything else is rigged up with attractive ten-plug junction boxes. At Christmas I used all the plugs in the living room for the tree, popped corn in my bathroom and dried my hair under the fridge light. My apartment building is classified as a Neubau. One would think this means the building is new, but not in Munich. Here it seems to mean that the structure was erected in 1962, but the individual apartments were renovated in the seventies (brown and orange décor) or eighties (the beige and brown period). The elevators in these buildings are small, shaky and have a mirror, so when you get stuck you can see how scared you are. There are handy high-security laundry rooms in most Neubau basements. To do wash in my building you have to go through several doors, all of which lock behind you - so if a mugger is down there, I have to politely ask him to wait while I find my key so I can escape him. Apartments in the city don’t generally come with closets, kitchen appliances, lighting or, in my case, a toilet seat. This means that the day you move in you crouch in the dark, order pizza and throw your jacket on the floor – if you could afford the necessities, you would not be living in this dinky place. This does not mean, however, that I favor the Altbau. When I first moved to Munich, uncertain of my employment prospects, I agreed to take a room in a turn-of-the-century apartment with two other women. They wrote to me before I arrived, “Your room is large with a southern exposure and a lovely view. The apartment itself is five huge rooms with hard-wood floors.” The rooms were big, the ceilings high enough to keep the exposed wiring out of direct view and the floors were wood all right – like in a barn. My room sure got a lot of sun and the view of the strip of used- car dealerships was breathtaking. It was summer, and it just didn’t seem so bad to have to walk the half-mile to the narrow room with the chain-pull toilet at night, or get up thirty minutes early to push the button on the water heater in the separate bathroom to take a shower. Winter cast a chill on these procedures. It was autumn when I found out what those strange contraptions were in our rooms. “Now, Liz, you have an oil stove in your room, so we’ll have to order a hundred gallons of heating oil which you will siphon into a watering can from a tank in the cellar as needed,” my roomie explained. “I have a wood stove in my room – make sure to be home Tuesday, ’cause the delivery guys won’t carry a cord of wood up four flights. Oh, and Claudia has a gas oven. The pilot light is tricky, so check it if you smell gas.” After two days of tossing matches into the flowing oil and running for my life, I would have traded my toilet seat for a radiator any day. I finally called my mother and had her mail me a carbon-monoxide detector so I wouldn’t expire some night in front of Harald Schmidt’s late show. (Altbau apartments don’t necessarily have cable.) Finding the right place takes a keen eye, especially when reading the abbreviated German in real estate ads. “1Z, EBK, Bad,” for instance, means one-room, kitchen appliances, bathtub. But do not be fooled. “1Z, PStrhlzer, WCoKd, oF, NFlghfn, slN, DM 700 k” may sound like a lot for the money, but it translates into, “one-room, a book of matches, toilet without seat, windowless, near airport, very loud neighbors, heat not included.” Luckily, my apartment came with appliances, and the renter before me even bought the new john seat. As glass lampshades are priced like diamonds in Munich and I refuse to buy one of those DM 8 Chinese-paper-lantern-like lampshades at Ikea, the only light in my kitchen will remain a piece of modern art – a bulb dangling from a wire. I went out recently and bought a washing machine, but I don’t have any place to plug it in.