All I Want for Christmas...

It has always annoyed me that most people always assume that the world has grand plans for me when something rotten happens – in life there are three certainties: death, taxes, and the deluge of supportive clichés that always seem to accompany a rough week. Granted, I can’t blame people for offering helpful platitudes when I’m coated in grime from a week without bathing, it is admittedly difficult to be sympathetic for someone who smells like an old shoe. However, when you’re at the end of your rope, sometimes you just need to hear your friends offer to use a leftover length of it to string up your tormentor.

So it is especially difficult for me to inform you all that we are happy in our new apartment… no, exceedingly happy. Even ecstatic, jubilant, elated… but we never would have known how happy a simple thing like a bathtub and hot water could make us without the hellish ordeal of the past 4 months to compare to. Fortunately, we can now turn our little clichés around a bit: we never knew how bad we had it until we had it this good! So Merry Christmas to us – we have a great home that we’ll be able to enjoy for years if we need to.

Our discontent, which had been constant, if fluctuating since September, reached the tipping point in early December when our hot water heater burst from a combination of faulty internal plumbing and incompetent installation. To be more specific, it had been pushing it for several days until a conversation with our scumbag building manager finally led us to begin a feverish search of the surrounding areas for new digs before we had to renew our lease or put our faith in the good will of this profoundly unpleasant person.

Luckily, after a day of searching, we discovered a charming little haunt on the 6^th story of a building down the street from our old place that was equipped with a bathtub(!), hot water, a well, marble floors, festively painted walls, a balcony, and a charming landlord who happens to run a fantastic and delicious dessert shop over by Rauche.

And here we are. Since paying for moving and rent carved up our bank accounts significantly, we decided to have a merry little (emphasis on little) Christmas that would let us spend time with each other, with a smaller payout than a lengthy trip to America, Syria, or Europe would have entailed. After weeks of indecision and stress about our old living situation,

having a place that would actually allow us to relax was something of a luxury in itself that we didn’t intend on squandering. Our only really tangible gifts were 15 photos that we had printed to stick up on our walls… if we can find the space.

Though I had to suffer through about 2 hours of Christmas music to placate Tam and her residual appreciation for American audio-kitsch, we managed a fantastic Christmas Eve dinner of fresh calamari and shrimp in a wine-butter sauce, and a less successful mussel dinner that had to be donated to an ungrateful Assad since the frozen mussels were of a frighteningly inferior quality. Nevertheless, spending a cozy night snuggled up under the a blanket watching Mulholland Drive and chatting with family on Skype isn’t a bad way to go for our first Christmas abroad, and our first one as a married couple.

So Happy

New Year to everyone, let’s see what we can do with this one….