Let There Be Light

Apartments in Europe don't come equipped with light fixtures. You have to install them yourself.

Seriously—when you move in, there are wires hanging out of the ceiling where the light fixtures should be. The wires are multi-colored (which is a good thing, to those of you who know anything about electrical currents).

When my husband and I first moved to Germany, we thought the wires hanging out of the ceiling were pretty funny. But what we didn’t realize was how debilitating our lack of light fixtures soon would become. Our first night in our new apartment became a race against time. Once the sun went down, and darkness filled our apartment, there was very little we could actually accomplish.

Luckily for us, the previous tenants had left behind a broken floor lamp, which we carefully moved from room to room (depending upon which boxes we were unpacking). We propped our light up in a corner and worked by its “romantic glow.” The neighbors probably thought we had great mood lighting. Nope, just foreigners.

Although annoying, this plan seemed to be working well—until one very dark night. We were moving our light to yet another corner—but got a little too careless. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The light slid out of the corner in which it had just been placed, and crashed to the floor, as I put my hands to my head, and screamed, “Nooooooooo!” Brad lunged for the light…but it was all over—literally. The bulb shattered into a million pieces. No more light. No more unpacking. We now understood firsthand what it was like to be cave men, and why they had accomplished so little.

It was a big day when we went to buy light fixtures. After we had meticulously scrutinized each fixture, and assessed the finalists’ most winning attributes, we made our selection. We found a salesperson and asked if he spoke English. He said (in German), “Yes, but we should speak German.” Apparently, it was necessary that we receive a German lesson before purchasing lighting fixtures. We proceeded to ask, in broken German, if the fixtures we wanted were in stock. They were.