New Apartment!

Big news....Saturday I moved into our new apartment! Marco is out of town at an INSEAD alumni weekend so I did all the moving myself with my Mom. It wasn't much though, just some boxes and one relatively easy-to-carry bed. Took just one trip.

I'm at Nina's, a charming little coffeeshop up the street using the wi-fi. I'm trying to figure out what we should do for furniture. I'm really motivated to try to do salvage furniture -- taking old things and reusing or recombining them in new stylish ways. I have a good book on this. One cool example is a set of nine old mailboxes stacked 3-on-3 to make a shoe storage near the entryway. There are tables made out of old carved wood doors, and lamps in old wire birdcages.

This is a little too much for me though. Our new apartment is really tiny so I just basically can fit in a table, couch and chairs. Sad thing is it's really hard to build / refurbish your own couch. It's a ton of work and costs nearly as much as a cheap new couch. I guess I should aim for a blend of recycled furniture and IKEA.

Man alive! The music in this coffeeshop is ATROCIOUS!! It's an instrumental version of all Nirvana's hit songs with the melody done in violin with strings on backup! Good Lord who thought to put this on? That's one thing I really miss about Europe -- there isn't so much *%!!# music in nice cafes and pubs. Geeeeez who ever bought such a horrendous album?

The neighborhood here rocks. It's very interesting. We are sort of located on the threshold of urban renewal. To the south of our street there are posh and beautiful restored Victorian homes and to the north there's the ghetto. People in the street are a mix of black and white and affluent and not-affluent which is different from pretty much all the other places I've lived. It intrigues me. This area was first built about 150 years ago (very old for Minnesota) and all the tycoons of railroad and logging built their Victorian mansions here. F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up here and wrote the Great Gatsby based upon much of the opulence he saw (but did not have) here in these same streets. But then in the last half of the 20th century the area decayed precipitously. Money left, gangs and drugs moved in. In the 1970s this was one of the most dangerous parts of St. Paul. My uncle from Norway lived just a block from here when he came to study agriculture at the University of Minnesota in the 1970s and he said he heard gunshots all the time. (Why did he live here? Who knows, it was probably cheap for a student....he is also a very adventurous uncle.) Then in the 90s it started to come back. Now it's hot property and all the run-down Victorian homes are being restored to their former beauty. And they really truly are a beautiful form of architecture with all their unique towers, porches, colors. Their gardens are lush and natural and full of flowers too. It's really a pleasure to walk around. I was told that this neighborhood in St. Paul is the largest intact "historic neighborhood" left in the US.

So anyway, that's where I'm at. Marco should be home later this afternoon.