Kleine Fridge

I truly thought these days were behind me. One of my greatest annoyances about our cozy (real-estate speak for tiny) Brooklyn apartment in was the too-small midget refrigerator in our too-small kitchen. You laugh when I say the notion of reverting back to a fridge of that size was one of the reasons why Julie and I chose to move to Chicago over New York this last year – probably because the last time you had to deal with a tiny fridge was in the dorms in college. A tiny fridge means that you can usually only chill one bottle of wine and one six-pack at a time. A tiny fridge means that you can’t just cram the whole box from a half-eaten pizza on a shelf, but must laboriously wrap the slices in tin foil and balance them on top of the eggs. A tiny fridge means that your fruit gets all bruised from being wedged into the doll-size fruit locker. A tiny fridge means a tiny freezer. I didn’t know how good I had it back then.

Our apartment at the IBZ is pretty choice. Starting with the price (actually, I don’t know the price, as the bill goes directly to the sponsors of Julie’s fellowship… like I said, pretty choice). The location isn’t bad either. We are in Wilmersdorf near Rudesheimer Platz – a leafy residential neighborhood that was once home to the wealthy diplomats who plied their trade in West Berlin. The character of the neighborhood has no doubt changed somewhat since the Wall came down, but there are still plenty of Mercedes and BMWs parked on the street and the open-air markets charge double what one might find in the more Turkish-dominated areas like Kruetzberg. Picture somewhere on the Upper-East Side, swap the pizza joints with curry wurst carts, keep the falafel stands and you’ll have a pretty good idea. Amidst the wine-merchants, the framing stores and the specialty children’s toy shops stands the IBZ – a fortress of 70s architecture and interior design. The IBZ, or Internationales Begegnunszentrum der Wissenschaft Berlin (why not IBW or IBWB?), is the home for visiting foreign scholars working for higher-education centers like The Free University, the Max Planck Institute, and the Dartmouth semester abroad program among others. We are all transient residents, and as such, our apartments come fully furnished, down to the vacuum cleaner and extra hangers. And the tiny fridge.

Life with a tiny fridge actually works well when it is paired with life without a car. Trips to the supermarket are limited to what you can carry home. Life with a tiny fridge also works well when it is paired with an old-Europe sensibility where you buy your bread at the baker, your butter and milk at the dairy store and your fruit and veggies at the fresh produce stand. Life with a tiny fridge works when you are out-of-work, as I am this summer – when you can play act as the hausfrau (housmann?), planning meals no more than two or three days ahead, provisioning only with the freshest of ingredients and hitting the open-air markets I mentioned on Tuesdays and Fridays.

The biggest bottle of soda you can buy here is 1.5L, a good thing when you have a tiny fridge. Eggs come packaged in sixes rather than dozens, convenient when your tiny fridge has only seven egg dimples in the door. I have yet to see a half-gallon of milk. These smaller portions make sense, and from a dietary perspective are probably sensible, but the end result of life with a tiny fridge is that I am constantly hungry. I ration my yogurt, I eat my cheese in nibbles rather than chunks, I chill my beers by the bottle rather than by the six-pack. Maybe it is more civilized, but the real reason why people in Europe don’t take home doggie bags isn’t because it is déclassé, but because there would be nowhere to put them in the tiny fridge.