More Tales from the Kitchen

The view of our little veranda (like I love to call this place ;-) ). This is where we usually have our breakfast and lunch. I must admit that we often eat dinner in the livingroom in front of the tv... bad habit. Well, our little veranda reminds me of the pictures from Carl Larsson (well, except for the ugly, badly proportioned windows - but I´m doing my best to ignore them and imagine high, white-framed french windows, hee, hee, or some looking like the ones on the picture Flowers on the Windowsill). He is one of my favorite painters. And ever since I listened to the books of Astrid Lindgren as a child and seen pictures by Carl Larsson, I dreamed of Sweden. I have never been there for real, but about a few thousand times in my dreams! And now we are planning to go next summer! A dream come true! So now you now, why I love this part of our apartment so much! It´s this and the fact that the sun shines in here all afternoon. I´m dreaming of a kitchen sofa or a bench on the right hand side of the veranda, so I can lie down there and relax in the sun.
The veranda has it´s own little history. We live on the fifth floor of an old building near the city center. Originally this building only had four stories. But after World War II there have not been enough undamaged apartments in the cities, so often there was another story added to the buildings. As families could not afford large apartments, there had to be made more room. In our case, an engineer and his family moved into our appartment. And he built in these "shelves" in the kitchen to separate the room in front of the windows. Once there has even been a door and we think there were windows where now are the shelves (because that´s how it still looks like in the appartment on the other side of our building). Now one of his little girl had her own room there!