Still rainy ... still coldish (upper 30s for today.) Good French Onion Soup making weather. Now if I could just curl up with a good book and do nothing but read all day, I would be in heaven! But alas, I must do laundry, make meals, and clean the "flat".
I have had to learn not to say apartment, but flat. The question for the day is "what is the difference between an apartment and a flat?" I kept calling our place an apartment in my German class, and she finally corrected me, explaining the difference.
In Germany, the difference is that an apartment is a very small 1 room efficiency apartment. It is often more of what you would think a starving college student might have. Some have a space for a very small kitchen, while others have no kitchen at all - just a counter and a sink, perhaps. Some have a small bathroom as part of the apartment, while others have a community bathroom facility. Laundry would be either community or your choice of the nearest laundry mat.
A flat is more of what we would think of when we say apartment. It is often multi-roomed and has a separate kitchen and bathroom. Our flat even has a separate small room for the washer and dryer (and also for us, the garbage recycling system, since we have to have so many different cans to separate it all out.)
The question for the day today is "Why are there no smoke detectors in the flats?"
The word for the day today is Flat: die Wohnung (vo noong). It is also sometimes referred to as das Wohnschlafzimmer (vone shlahf tsim mer) meaning bedroom flat.
Auf Wiedersehen,
Frau Spitzer
