Armenia vs. The Gambia: Housing

While in The Gambia we lived in a large house, in Armenia we were allotted a small apartment in a five-story building. An Italian company manages the building and it is supposed to be the best address in town. It is supposed to be sturdy enough to withstand an earthquake (I don’t want to find out whether this is true) and the apartments have “modern European equipment and furnishings.” That means a tiny kitchen with tiny appliances and beautiful modern bathrooms that are tiny and have only shower stalls, no cabinets, and there is no way in hell you could fit a washer and a dryer in there.

Therefore, the ingenious workers of our Embassy decided to turn one of the three bedrooms in our apartment into a “laundry room/study,” i.e., beside the washer and the dryer, they plopped a desk, a chair and a single bookcase for the entire apartment in that room. Noisy dryer and detergent fumes from the washer create a perfect work environment; in fact, if all of the employees of US Embassies all over the world had them in their offices, the US government’s goals would be achieved successfully, in no time. We decided to make the second small bedroom a guest room and a study and the third bedroom, shamefully ruined, remains a laundry room along with storage space. In The Gambia, we had a separate small building alongside, but detached from the house, for laundry, storage and bathroom for the household staff.

A word about the kitchen and how much the Embassy leadership cares about the comfort of their employees: In The Gambia we had a huge kitchen about which we fondly joked it doubled as a dance floor. We had numerous cabinets, an American fridge and a separate huge freezer and an American electric stove and large oven. There was no dishwasher due to the unpredictable water situation.

The kitchen in our apartment here in Armenia had originally nine cabinets (three less then our one bedroom apartment in DC), one drawer and about a foot of counter space. When we arrived here, I opened them to gauge their size. To my horror, one of the cabinets housed a boiler, the second a strange dish drying contraption above the sink, the third revealed a chimney-like orange pipe that assumedly passes fumes from the stove to the outside. The fourth was a dishwasher and the fifth is a cabinet under the sink with the water pipe in it. The sixth is a fridge and the seventh the freezer. Only the eight and ninth, one above and one below the counter were fit to store kitchenware.

As I have an Italian last name and a husband with some Italian roots and undeniable love for Italian food (especially cheese) and culture, I decided to use these facts to my advantage in my negotiations with the Italian super of our building. I met Francesco in our apartment when he came to solve the issue of the gas flames of the stove melting the cabinets above it. I put on an Italian accent and told him I was a REHN-na, and my husband is Italian from Mi-LAH-no and we cook-a and bake-a a lot; I have many utensils-a, which will not fit into the two available cabinets-a. It worked. Gazing upon my figure, Francesco must have remembered his MAH-ma and sympathized. The next day his workers came to raise the cabinets on one side of the kitchen, transform the drying cabinet into a regular one and add more cabinets and counter space to the other side.

The Italian thing turned out to be very bucolic. Francesco gave me cabinets and counters so I could prepare food. The urban side of Italy oozing with absolute style vanished with my accent of an Italian peasant woman caring more about fresh manicotti for her husband than Prada boots and Armani sunglasses for herself.

I now have five more cabinets, four large drawers and four more feet of counter. Of the “Italian” cabinetry, the original nine cupboards are very stylish and modern with white doors and a marble countertop. The new ones are green with a wooden counter, evoking more of an air of rural Tuscany than high-street Milan.

“Welcome to our kitchen design warehouse; you can choose from these models today.”

When Dan and I first met the Ambassador’s deputy in his office, he pointed to the door and said that it is always open for any of our concerns. Delighted by the kindness of this man, we decided immediately to address one major concern that still hung over us in our kitchen: The oven is not “European size,” but a half of it, which means it is a third of an American oven and it corresponds to the size of something manufactured by the like of Fisher Price. As soon as we said this and expressed our concern of having to bake our daily bread in this oversized toaster, he raised himself up in his chair, and, like a cobra ready to strike, reddened in the face and yelled at us: “Congratulations, you just made a terrible first impression, you are complainers. This is a twenty-five percent hardship post and this is what we have here. If you cannot live with that why did you even bother coming here?” Stunned and trying to save the situation, albeit all freaked out, I explained that while we are coming from a twenty percent hardship post where we had had an US oven, if it’s not possible to change the situation, we’d deal with it. This evidently calmed the beast, especially when I abruptly changed the subject and asked about his children. He sat back and was friendly again. I was happy to have made a new “friend.”