Stage 3 - All Done! The Kitchen Start to Finish

This is the kitchen the day I moved in.  All there is is water, a welcome kit teapot and the magnets the previous owner left on the fridge.

This is a few days after my stuff arrived - I skipped the boxes phase as it is just a big photo of boxes. But this took a few days just to get to this stage.

This is after the paint and the cleaning and the organizing and finally hanging up some art.

Looking into the storage room - no shame in decorating your storage closet.

 

I finally got to hang up my rainbow poster from the Tube in London - I never had a place for it before. It made me very happy.

All done!  The kitchen is the most important for me since I really do think it is the heart of a house.  I am so glad to be done because I have already started making cookies - I think my workmates are going to hate me if I keep bringing in cookies (seriously - at first it is nice, then it is just a lot of butter and sugar!)....

View from my Kitchen - Post Storm

So I looked out my kitchen window during sunset and this was the view.  Pretty much every night I get a fairly extraordinary sight but this was particularly beautiful thanks to the prior storm. (wasn't that video crazy!)   I am loving living on the 18th floor - I can't get enough of the sky. 

Rainstorm

Buenos Aires has incredible storms.  The wind, the noise, the lightning - all reminds me of the great storms we saw crossing Paynes Prairie in Gainesville, Florida.  My State Department colleague and friend Robin was visiting during the last storm, and we went out on my deck to look at the clouds rolling in.  You have to watch the video to experience it -  we ultimately had to bring in all the furniture and rugs because they could have gone over the side.  But it was pretty awesome to watch the rain...

Goodbye Old Friends - Mondays Suck

I went out this morning to run errands and two things died simultaneously - my wallet I have had since at least 2005 and my Birkenstocks from college.  It was a sad moment, saying goodbye to my super personal objects.  But sometimes, you have to do it.  Now I am carrying my cards and money in a ziploc bag and have no orthotic shoes to wear - thank god for Zappos...
Enjoy your Monday.

Step Two - Moving into New Apartment

The Foreign Service if full of many things. The most annoying? Moving.  I forgot because I stayed in D.C. for five years, and the move to Afghanistan meant pack everything up and cart it off to storage. It was a lot easier than the chaos that ensued when I accepted the tour in Argentina.  I packed out twice, and had to get it all in one place, and organize the boxes and select what to leave behind and bla bla bla. 

I own enough stuff to fill a three bedroom apartment, which, when I am in my two bedroom condo in DC, means I have to stack most of my stuff in a basement storage unit like sardines.  But when I arrived in Argentina, with shipments from Kabul, from D.C. and from storage, it spread out like our middles as we age.  The process is crazy. First, you find a lovely woman from Peru named Soledad who is willing to be paid to help you make order from chaos.    Then, because she has worked for diplomatic families for more than 15 years, she knows how to pack a welcome kit back up. 
Then you have the moving crew arrive and bring, wait for it, 195 boxes.  Yep.  195 boxes.  And then they are everywhere. Like rabbits left to their own devices. And your underwear is packed with your pots and pans and you spend three weeks trying to remember what you owned to figure out if it all made it. I swear I am missing a canoe, but who knows.

Attached to this are the photos of the boxes, and lovely Soledad in my kitchen.  Then you get a view out my balcony down 18 flights to the ground.  My sofa (which I didn't even realize was part of my shipment, but thank god it was because...embassy sofas don't fit in the elevator so I would have had a house full of chairs) had to be lifted up all 18 flights!  So here are a few pics of the entire Argenmove team working to lift the sofa up those flights.  Let's just say, I can see why people never move.  So we went from boxes to a living room filled with boxes, and a sofa...enjoy the unbelievable amount of work it took to put this apartment in this sad state..next phase, post two weeks of working every single day...wait for it :)

Gabriela Sabatini

Yep - you would have never guessed this one! Gabriela Sabatini came in for a visa, and we introduced her to the Ambassador. She is as nice as she is lovely.  Gave her a certificate for the 22nd anniversary of her Grand Slam win.  This mostly makes me want to get a haircut, run 100 miles, get some sun, and, I don't know, train for 20 years as a professional athlete :) 

Random Celebrity Spotting - Tom Brokaw

The Climate Reality Project, which was founded by Al Gore, leads trip to Antarctica to look at the effects of global warming.  They can reach parts of Antarctica that have been unpassable in all recorded history until the last two years due to ice melt.  The list of participants was fairly incredible - including Richard Branson, multiple celebrities, luminaries from most of the science and arts, and of course, Al Gore.  I even got to meet the President of Iceland and his wife.  Only got one decent photo, with Tom Brokaw and his equally amazing (and nice) wife Meredith Brokaw.  Met another celebrity the next day - very random week.  You will NEVER guess who that was...

Step One - New Apartment

I moved from Palermo, right near the Embassy, to Belgrano, a neighborhood about twenty minutes north-ish of the American Embassy.  It is a great neighborhood, much more residential than where my old apartment was and easy to use the bus.  
Problem? When I moved in, it had furniture from the 1980s, and dirty curtains, and was decked out like the set for a porn film.

In order to clean it up, I have fallen off the map for the last two weeks. I painted, received my two shipments from Washington and Kabul, and started trying to make all the stuff I own, most of which I don't need, into one apartment. 

Eventually, I have to get back to life, exploring the city, making friends, staying in touch with old friends,
and basically getting settled.
I am still in the process as my landlord is the U.S. Embassy and they control the resources to get stuff cleaned up. I could make a two page list of things that need fixing...including the oven, the lights, the locks...but hey, at least my stuff is here.

So - phase 1 - prepainting.  You can see the living room, kitchen, and main bedroom.
Next will come the paint photos and then, if I ever finish, finally, will come the photos with furniture.

My second visitor arrives this Saturday (and the first that is staying with me) so I have to get it all done by Friday - fingers crossed.