i had the pleasure of accompanying the globe-trotting emma when she bravely (a.k.a. perhaps a tad recklessly) decided to move to prague, sight unseen. much luck brought us (her) czech-american roommates, meaning they spoke czech but didn't have various baggage that comes with being born and raised in the czech republic. their names were tom and dan (and probably still are).
tom, dan, emma and i met with these landlords of the apartment that tom and dan had found. this was exactly ten years ago, which means that emma and i were twenty-three. (incidentally, if i ever have a daughter, if, when she's twenty-three, i find out she's conducting real estate deals in a language she doesn't speak in a country she's in for the first time, i will have a heart attack.) for some reason, we all met in the basement/ private party room of a greek restaurant. the main landlord (i think there were like two or three guys there) ordered espressos for us and then ceremonially passed around bananas. that's right, bananas. so: two or three middle-aged czech men, tom and dan speaking czech to them and english to us, and me and emma, all with a mural of the parthenon behind us, and all with espressos and bananas.
so you will understand why it came as no surprise today when chad and i closed on the house and the seller's attorney had an eastern european accent and a prince valiant haircut. we're pretty sure he stepped out at some point to smoke some pot. he was actually macedonian, to be fair, and gave us a wee history lesson about greece, macedonia and yugoslavia. we got no bananas, however, and frankly? i missed them.
so anyway, i own property now. when mortgages come up in conversation and there's a smartypants around, inevitably that smartypants will point out that the etymology of "mortgage," amounts to "death pledge." smartypantses aside, however, if i had to compare getting married, getting my phd, and buying a house---all of which i did this summer--i would say that of those three, signing my life away in debt unto death actually feels like the biggest deal. like, physically.
one of my body's charming little ways of registering stress is that my fingers itch and i get a rash on them. and lordy, with that macedonian in the room, did my fingers ever itch. holy crap.
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4 comments:
ah fond memories of prague past. i wish i could mail you a banana. congrats on the house!
i'm wondering if your new home came equipped with buckets of soap nubbins or naked pictures of the landlady like the prague apartment did.
i forgot about the soap nubbins. but i will never ever ever forget about the naked picture. i *cannot* believe we don't still have that.
how about the entire box full of blown ceramic fuses?
and how about the communist-era spices that smelled like the carcass of a skunk that had rolled in its own feces and then set itself on fire? or the death bed? good, good, good, good times.
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