city updates

As much as I'm sure you'd love a play by play of each day of our trip it's frankly a bit boring and will take forever. I am bored writing it, and I know that it can never precisely capture our experiences or the excitement. If it's boring for me, it's surely boring for you.

Instead, I think I will post a more concise reaction to each place with plenty of photos. If you have questions about places, experiences, or something else I'm more than happy to answer them, just leave them in a comment below.

There's so much going on that will hopefully be more inspiring to write about and plenty more trips around the corner. I need to enjoy the downtime while I have it and get our apartment settled, because we're back to exploring foreign lands in early April.

Color of 2010: Turquoise

Did you see Pantone's new color of the year? Turquoise!


I love this color. It has such a warm feeling and makes me think of a breezy day at the beach. If only I could feel the sun on my face.

While I was home I bought the red spice grinder that perfectly matches our little red refrigerator. They have such a creative product line.

The Pantone people haven't missed a beat either, because they have an ipod touch app for their tremendous color wheel called myPANTONE. I will be snatching Stefan's and using this when it comes time for decorating our new apartment.

We're Moving!

It's been so hard not to share this, but we're moving! Things progressed much quicker than we expected, but we are thrilled.

I'd love to tell you that we are setting up home in Paris or Tokyo... but we're staying put here, in the little village that could - Munich (at least for now - who knows what the future holds).

Our beautiful new apartment is an alt-bau (old building) with tons of character, creaky wooden floors, spacious rooms with high ceilings, and a beautiful little balcony off the kitchen. It gets tons of sun light, which gives me hope that I can rival my Mom's herb garden. Not only that, it's in our same neighborhood, so parting ways with our home won't be so difficult.

While we were back in the US, I constantly saw beautiful pieces of art that I wished so desperately to have wall space for. On every shopping expedition I would say, 'we need more walls!'

I have a great collection and love for art - from my beloved Joe Sorren 'Portrait of Emily', to the piece from our wedding, prints from etsy, antique maps, and zillions of photos from our travels.

And to add to my collection, my parents gifted me the beautiful 'States United' print from etsy's Beauchamping. It's a thoughtful reminder of my home - and it's even heart shaped, just like Ohio, 'the heart of it all'.

Now all we need are more guests!

Dream kitchen

As of now, we're definitely making the most of the city life. We live small, we live simply, and we live well below our means. It's really quite nice. It also means we must be very particular about the things we decide to fill our small space with and I am always thinking ahead.

Slowly we've been working on updating our apartment to make it more of our own place. I absolutely love looking at inspirational images and wondering where life will take us. In the meantime I often gather things that are meaningful to me. Some we are able to incorporate now - like our new fridge that arrived this morning!, and other things we'll have to hold off on... like a subway tile back splash in the kitchen.

I also love the fact that Stefan continually is commenting how much he loves our refrigerator.

Not only do I want my dream kitchen to have a subway tile back splash, but I want the entire kitchen to have a very slight subway undertone. I have a cookie jar, à la my Grandma, that my sister gave me a few years ago. It is a London underground sign. She also recently showed me the beautiful Parisian subway dish cloth, which I have added to my wish list.

Isn't it lovely to surround yourself with things you enjoy and to look forward to?

Here are bits of the master plan...

The subway tile kitchen belongs to Genifer Goodman Sohr, who is a well known stylist. I saw these images on her equally talented friend, Sara Hicks Malone's blog Party Perfect, and I can't quit thinking about them. They also match our table and chairs that we recently purchased.


I promise I'm not on a French kick, but I also love the work of antoin + manuel, a French design duo. And continuing on the subway theme, they have a lot of beautiful pieces including one aptly titled RATP (Parisian Metro), Carte Intégrale, 2005. Their website is a real treasure trove for design lovers.

In other things French... I was overjoyed yesterday when I was in town shopping for a few things and found two things I have been dreaming about. Originally I had see them on uncommongoods and the Moma Store, but today I found them here in Munich.

I really love Revol French porcelaine - it's minimal, very resistant, and simply elegant. Some of their pieces are quite classic, while others - like the the things I bought today, are slightly comical. They keep things interesting.

They have an entire line called the Recycled collection. I love the curving ruffle lines of the 'pommes frites' dish - and the crumpled tumbler is just cute and fits so nicely in my hand.

The best design advice is to surround yourself with things that you love and I can really attest it adds to my happiness.

Red refrigerator

We have been in the market for a new fridge for a while. I love Smeg refrigerators and was so happy to find a similar version for slightly less.

Our big red retro friend will be moving in sometime next week!

It's from gorenje, which used to make Siemens refrigerators. Good enough for me, it's energy efficient, not noisy, and ultra cute.

Sorry the photo isn't the best... I was a little excited.

Renovation vacation - details

Over the past 4 days we have made too many trips to IKEA (although I secretly love going because I can feed my Swedish fish addiction), spent approximately 94 hours together, and overhauled most of our apartment.

The idealist in me thought we would get most everything done in just a couple of days and still have plenty of time to burn discovering hidden parts of the city or venturing away on a day trip... I couldn't have been more wrong.

I think I may have under estimated how much work and time it was going to take to re-do our little place. There are still a few things that we need to take care of, but we have definitely been making progress.

I will also say redecorating with your loved one may be added to the list of things you should do with a potential spouse, right between 'see them at their worst (sick and or drunk apply)' and 'watching how they handle tangled christmas lights'. Luckily we both survived.

The monotonous moving of things and helping with with manual labor sometimes makes me daze off. When Stefan was trying to do something precise that I was supposed to help with I started to zone out. I could sense his irritation. When I told him I was thinking about other things he asked, 'Like what? - Cake?' These are the moments I wish he didn't know me so well. These are also the moments that I wish he realized I was not a mind reader and holding something 'just so' isn't one of my better abilities.

Despite the occasional irritations Stefan and I really have come together and actually enjoyed updating our place. One of the best things about reorganizing was finding our little heart cardboard scrap from when we moved. We tucked it behind my defunct closet and Stefan wrote 'Emily + Stefan 4 Ever' with the date. Yes, we could be in the 4th grade. It will have to find a new place so we can discover it once again and get a much needed smile and reminder during a move.

Along with the reorganizing joy comes the need to do more. We're already considering what other projects we can begin. Refurbishing our kitchen is topping my list and getting a new car is topping Stefan's. I have trouble getting excited over things like 'climate control', which in my American eyes should come as a standard feature, but that's another topic in itself.

Since we are seriously tired from all of the racing around, I thought I would post a few photos of the details. I realize some of them you may have seen elsewhere in this blog, but they are the few things that have found their new homes and I don't really want to post the photos of when things were seriously disheveled. In the coming days as things settle down I will try to post more photos.

I'm sure you can hardly stand the anticipation - just try to contain the excitement as much as we are.

Turning a new leaf

We have really decided to tackle our apartment and make it more personal. Tomorrow we'll begin to replace a lot of, as Stefan says, 'ramshackle furniture'. This is a day that I feared and also get excited for. I am already looking forward to not feeling as if a bomb went off here as we reorganize. As soon as our furniture is delivered tomorrow I know it will feel like a new chapter.

When I first moved to Germany I was hesitant of spending money on things that made the move feel permanent. I worried if purchasing a flat screen TV was too much of an investment. Despite my hesitations, I believe that was one of our first purchases - followed by a washing machine and dishwasher. Now I can't imagine life without them.

This included little things as well and went as far as struggling to buy new matching dishes, but slowly I came around and these things started to feel like necessities in creating a life.

I was afraid that being an international couple would mean moves to who knows where, and more material things that I didn't want to be attached to. I worried about not being able to use our electronics in a another country and about my dishes breaking during a move.

My parents can undoubtedly attest to this since they have a decent amount of my breakables in my childhood room and basement. While I still yearn for the day that I am able to have my dishes and breakables in one place, I have crossed that hurtle of wanting to enjoy the place that I am living. I've slowly come around to 'live in the now' and not dwell on what-if scenarios.

On a recent tour I gave I met a wonderful American woman who had also been through tumultuous moves. She really reminded me of what a special time in my life this is. We are free to travel and concentrate on being a couple. We have truly taken that to heart.

I believe this is the first time Stefan has had days off of work that we have not gone on a trip. Between the redecorating and hitting up several of our 'staycation' destinations, or going on a day trip, I'm already looking forward to having a more sophisticated place.

Since we have other obligations and won't be able to travel much during his vacation days, it gives me a small taste of what life will be like once we have different priorities. It only reaffirms my feelings that much more and we'll be enjoying these days while we have them.

Sayonara ramshackle furniture!

Apartment improvements

Stefan and I began our apartment updating and are very happy with the progress. We bought a new table and chairs. The table also has a couple of shelves - great for cookbooks and sadly Stefan is mistaken that his baseball glove and football have also found a nice home.

I left the bottle out because I was hoping to find some flowers today, but they were unfortunately not looking so great so I will have to look elsewhere. I would have thought flowers would be everywhere at this time of year!

The bottle is one of the limited edition designs by Christian Lacroix for Evian. It is quite beautiful and will make a cute little vase... I am a sucker for beautiful packaging - especially when I can recycle it.

Since Lacroix is French, it got me thinking about a few things. First, I am supposed to be going back to Paris in September and I cannot wait. Second, I previously wrote about the Eiffel Tower getting a viewing deck to celebrate it's 120th anniversary. I've since read this is a hoax. I'm interested to hear more about it and a bit surprised at the uproar that it has caused.

It looks like we will have an action packed summer and a lot to look forward to this fall. It's just the way I like to spend my second half of the year.