Laowai

Our move is looming over me. Last week I had a minor freak out because I realized how little time I have before the movers come. I have exactly two weeks from today.

I’ve been going through every closet and every cupboard and drawer. I’ve realized I have too many containers. You know that feeling you get – if you just get some nice plastic boxes everything will become organized. Or how you just have to have more lovely baskets to put stuff in. Well, I have enough baskets and bins and boxes – I just need less stuff. Moving really makes you think about your stuff and your relationship to your stuff. I like my stuff and yet packing stuff like fabric or little sculptures that the girls made or purses I love but rarely use – it makes me think. I don’t go in for that Marie Condo stuff – I like to be surrounded by things that remind me of memories and people. Or I just like to surround myself with things that please my eyes. Stuff is not bad, but when you consider how much it costs to ship it – well then I have to pause and really evaluate each item and how much I love it. And then there is the possibility that our stuff will end up lost or at the bottom of the ocean on it’s way to Switzerland. Yeah, it’s a remote possibility, but it pops into my head and adds to my general anxiety. And then still there is stuff that I am not attached to, but I just haven’t gotten rid of because we have a big house and it just gets filled up. I went through a box of old linens today – things like tablecloths that I made for our small table at our old apartment. I hadn’t looked at them in ages, but there they sat on the shelf in a closet. I really do feel like my main occupation as a mom and manager of our home is to shuffle stuff in and out and around our house. It feels a bit silly and meaningless sometimes. I sorted through all our holiday decorations over the weekend. Paring it all down to the stuff that I really love. That was hard. Our house is starting to feel really disorderly because I’m putting piles of stuff everywhere. I want to make it clear for the movers which things are getting shipped and which things are staying so I’ll end up moving things all around – making one room all go and other rooms all stay. I think about our new apartment all the time. One thing I’ve learned from moving is that you can’t just expect all your furniture and storage stuff to work in a new place. 

Yikes – that was a bunch of rambling. Here are a few pictures of our apartment (with the previous tenants stuff). The whole apartment is shaped like a quarter of a circle – with the curved part all in windows. Here’s the living room, you can see the fireplace and the dining area in the distance.

The kitchen and dining area:

We have two patios – this one is off the kitchen (cats not included).

And here’s our bedroom: