I Get Up And I Buy The Paper, And I Circle Them All, And I Phone Them Only To Discover They’ve Been Taken By A Bunch Of Fucking Psychic House Hunters.

Hello everybody,

Well, it certainly has been a while since I last got around to posting. I now have a lot to catch up!

First of all, I’m happy to announce that Daisy’s quote from Spaced (in the title, duh) does no longer apply and I have finally moved into my first, very own, flat. It’s a darling one-room flat, but cut in such a way that you hardly notice it. It’s not huge but it’s no shoebox either, meaning it takes more than 5 paces to cross from one end to the other. I have a very cool kitchen niche, with a (now) working fridge and even an oven! No, that’s not necessarily a given in one-room flats in Zurich. As soon as I find a suitable form, I’m going to bake my brownies again! I put up a charming, wood-framed blackboard one the wall, so that I can write down anything relating to kitchen/cooking matters. It looks a bit restaurant-ey which I love. The cupboards however are, though spacious, a horrible shade of brown (please note the subtle euphemism here) and I need to think of something to decorate them and make at least some of that brown space disappear. I’m thinking my A4 sized Moulin Rouge! posters should do the trick, but I’m not quite sure yet if they would really look that good in a kitchen… hmmm.
There is, in front of the kitchen, a big area where I set up my work space. The previous tenant had her dinner table etc there (which at first thought made sense), but I wanted a large work space, considering that I am and probably always will be, more of a working/writing person than a cooking person. I like having everything I need to work at my fingertips, I like having all that stuff comfortably and expansively sitting there, just waiting to be used.
I therefore set up the table and four chairs in front of the door and was lucky enough that my spatial sense didn’t desert me while buying them at Ikea, so that they fit perfectly against that wall. Towards the back of the room, there’s a bookcase, a drawer that doubles as a vanity desk and a huge wardrobe (believe it or not, those come with every Swiss flat) I’m most grateful for, since it allows me stow away my purses, shoes and, wow, my clothes! That wardrobe however also dates from the sixties and is in dire need of some decorating. Maybe some more movie posters, eh?
Also on that end is the bathroom. The first thing I did there was put up my Robert-deNiro-in-”are-you-looking-at-me?!”-pose from Taxi Driver on the outside of the door. And the year that movie came out then also set the tone for the inside of the bathroom. Since it’s tiled in yellow (no, not “sunny!” but “looks like Tweety just swallowed me whole”) and green (no, not “green fields!” but “looks like Daffy Duck just took a shit here”) and even the toilet seat is a sort of fluorescent yellow (enough said), I just had to theme the whole room in order to make it inhabitable. So the seventies it is! I got a shower curtain with multi-coloured circles, a cream-coloured, round bathmat (to cover up in style as much as possible from the green floor) and purple handtowels. The only thing missing now is a “make love not war” poster I plan to paint as soon as I get my gouache colours from Munich to Zurich, which is tomorrow. And presto! I don’t dread going to the bathroom anymore. My medicine cabinet is full to the brim by now. Who knew I had such an exorbitant amount of care products and cosmetics? A look inside it would make you think “here lives the most vain person on the planet”. What the hell though, the secret’s out: it takes a lot to make us girls look breezy, pretty, sublime and as if we all achieved that without ever touching beauty products.
My bed area is great too. I “inherited” the double bed from the previous tenant – which is great, because that way I didn’t even have to pay for something I would have had to get anyways. The bed is low, Japanese-style low, and since there is no place for a sofa in there, I strategically placed some big, beautiful cushions on the floor, so now the whole area looks comfy, creative and Zen. I love it and it’s my favourite place to be.
All in all, I love having a room of my own now. It’s still a little “surreal but nice” to come home, to a calm, quiet place and not to have to think about any others who would be offended if I walked to the bathroom in the buff. I’m not even quite used to the flat “being mine”, but it’s a lovely getting-used-to -it.

And now for something completely different: I had end of term exams! Two, to be precise, but important ones. I just heard that we got the results yesterday, so I will have to look today and see if I passed these exams or not. One was a writing exam and the other my journalism exam. It was four and a half hours long and we had a full-on press conference with a guest who was commissioned just for the exam and then we had to write a short newsbit about it and a long report. I hope I passed with a good grade!
Next term should be interesting because I’m going to be on the student committee for the journalism section of our school. It’s a cool job: we have to be mediators between the student body and everybody else who teaches at or runs the school. We have conferences, plan events and generally try to make the school better. We also get 200 CHF per term (think: almost four months’ worth of public transport in Zurich) and we have to take one less “general knowledge” course (think: less money to pay in tuition fees) because it is considered training of general knowledge and abilities to be on the student committee.

Otherwise, I’m working 3 days a week at the call-centre and it looks like true vacation time will be scarce. I’m trying to fit it in though. I have one week for sure at the end of August, where I will come to Munich, so I hope that I will see all of you Munich-based blog readers and friends then!

I need to go now, as I’ve got a myriad of things to tend to before this day is over, but I do hope to hear from y’all soon.

Peace,

Anna