We moved!

Last weekend, we left Qat-har, and moved to our new home. As you may recall, it has a whopping 7 rooms for us to fill. We assembled a Jokkmokk, which did not help much. It looks ridiculously small in our dining room... Oh well, we meant to put it outside on the porch anyway.

But the flowers that our landlords gave us are beautiful!

Apart from the badly put together Jokkmokk, we managed to haul a sofa into one of our two living rooms. We then assembled a coffee table and a lamp, lit the fire place and called it a day.



Our stuff from Germany was supposed to arrive today, but did not, and it is unclear when it will get here. But whatever, we have a sofa, a jokkmokk, a kitchen, internetz, and a mattress on the floor, so we are already at the level we reached in two years in Germany!

Köttbullar

Last week we ate meatballs three days in a row. Besides the köttbullar pictured above, kefta with lemons, and kefta with cherries (kliekjes from way back when).



And yes, I still hate Ikea.

Back by Popular Demand

More pictures of our IKEA furniture! Mr. Bojangles was kind enough to model on top of red pillows, making this a special blog post for Adrie. He is sporting his "WTF is this camera doing in my face?"-look.



Also, we had some surprisingly good Chinese food in a Chinese restaurant yesterday, with some Chinese coworkers of Anke, to celebrate Chinese New Year. Happy Spring Festival to all of y'all, especially the rabbits amongst you. I bet you are as anxious to put on your red underwear, as I am to finally take them off after a year.

A Rare Favorable Juncture of Circumstances

Mr. Bojangles was awake, and the sun was shining (for a whole 30 minutes or so)!

Integration Lesson #1: Don't let strangers into your house

You'd think we'd know better by now about the mess you can get into when letting a stranger move in with you. But we are stupid, and when someone tells us they have a 12 week old kitten they cannot handle, we just say "Bring 'em on".

This morning, after another night of being kept awake by Mister Bojangles' singing, we noticed he had found an even better spot for our fourth bathroom -- on top of the Ektorp.

Thank you, Mr. Bojangles!

We stripped the Ektorp which fortunately has washable covers. We also washed the pillows, which will probably take ages to dry, so Ellen and Christiaan will have to join us on the floor when they visit this week. Perhaps it will not smell of cat excretions once it is dry...



We had expected we would have to go back to square one in our taming efforts, but surprisingly, Mr. Bojangles seems to have forgiven us for stripping his hiding place of its covers and then making lots of noise with the vacuum cleaner.

This evening, he even let me pet him. And he purred! Of course, all of this happened while he was hiding under the sofa, and I was doing my cat whisperer act. He seems to severely regret letting himself go like that, though, and has been hissing at me ever since.

Still, it is progress. Maybe...

Waiting on Mr. Bojangles

No, this is not Anke imitating a seal. This is Anke in her capacity of cat whisperer.



Mr Bojangles must be happy, he is grooming himself! His address, however, is still:

Mr. Bojangles
Ektorp 1
Heidenkopferdell 24
Saarbrucken 66123
Germany.

What happened?

This weekend, Anke's father and brother were awesome enough to drive all the way up here with Frans's old furniture (that he gave to Anke over nine years ago). Which Anke's parents had been awesome enough to keep safe for more than NINE years.

So we are now the proud owners of a pretty good old bed, three old BILLY book shelves, an old and heavy marble table, and a new and dirt cheap JOKKMOKK table (OK, maybe not so proud of the IKEA stuff).

We then forced Anke's father and brother to go and pick up some furniture we had bought from a colleague. This resulted in even more IKEA furniture: a VÄRDE kitchen block, a small IKEA cabinet I can't find on their website, a KVINTETT lamp, and a fridge that is as old as Methusalem.
Anke's father and brother were thrilled at the opportunity of lugging these extremely heavy and bulky gems up three flights of stairs with us!

This week, our stuff from Beijing will be delivered here. We are looking forward to adding our IKEA hairy pillow explosion. We then plan to drive to the IKEA that is 30 km away, and add this beautiful EKTORP sofa to our worldly belongings.

While we are there, we will be sure invite Mr and Mrs IKEA to come over and shoot their next catalogue in our apartment.

One day, when we are grown ups, we will buy nice furniture...

Ikea is cool

The weather is hot. The air is ridiculously polluted. But, fortunately, Ikea offers free air conditioned living rooms and bed rooms to suffering Beijingers.

Salmon Pancake

SUI

Here is what happens if you drink a bottle of wine before going to IKEA.





Shopping under influence -> hairy pillow explosion.

It may not look like much...

... but we really enjoyed this pasta created by Frans.



It contained smoked salmon from Ikea, something called Fetaki from Germany, leeks and onions from the local Golden Five Star supermarket, and capers and pasta from our kitchen cabinet (which we were lucky to have, because Golden Five Stars seems to have replaced the pasta isle by a Lays chips isle).

Ikea

Shame shame shame on us. We should have found some local carpenter to build us a cd case, but instead we went to Ikea today. Frans says he loathes Ikea, but nonetheless we went home with not just a cd case, but also a plant, a lot of candles, aprons, blankets and spice containers.