September 29, 2006

Rack o' Spice

We'll be leaving for Melbourne in a little over a week (8 days to be precise). I'm excited, mainly by the thought of settling down somewhere. It's been close to a year that we've been travelling and I'm a wee bit tired. I've been slaking my nesting urges by looking at pictures of Melbourne rentals, even though I am admittedly getting a tad ahead of myself. While in Oamaru, we purchased a nice little print of a Kauri tree and I proceeded to amuse Z by pretending to hang it on an imaginary wall in our non-existent house while walking down the street. It will go nicely with the beetles we bought in Christchurch.

Back in Wellington, I stopped by the Med Food Warehouse to pick up some more cumin (for the fabulous four-dish Indian dinner I cooked) and was overwhelmed by the thought of actually setting up a house. When was the last time I really and truly started from scratch? Probably when I moved off-campus to Foster Court with K&K - then there were five of us with at least eight local parents willing to donate various items. That was in, let me think, 1996? Good lord, it's been a while! And now there are two of us and one local parent, two of us who currently possess exactly no furniture, no bedding, no pots, no pans, no utensils, no towels - not much of anything, really, except clothes, shoes, dive gear, a couple of laptops and some books of crossword puzzles (essential).

I imagine us signing a lease and moving in to our new home. It's the easiest move we've ever made, dragging in our four bags. There we are on our first night, sleeping on the floor wrapped in sleeping bags we borrowed from someone. We get up in the morning and don't even have the capacity to make ourselves tea because we have no pots, no spoons, no cups of any sort. Want some water? Better cup your hands under the kitchen tap. Want a shower? Too bad - we have no towels. The house is completely empty but for us and our four bags, which we stack into "desks" and perhaps a "table".

What triggered this thought? Spices (duh). I was thinking about what goes into making a working kitchen and spices are definitely up there. This got me thinking about spice racks which made me realize just how many essential kitchen items we don't have. Okay okay, so "spice rack" may not be essential, but there are plenty of things we don't have that are. I suppose we'll empty out mum's old jar collection and become depositories for all the crap various friends and acquaintances were going to throw out. And we'll scour the local Sallies and garage sales and whatever passes for Craigslist in Melbourne. And then, one day, we'll wake up in a bed and, after drying off with our own towels after a shower, we'll cook up a big spice-laden breakfast, which we'll eat sitting on chairs around a table that is not made of an old suitcase.

And one day there will be world peace and a solution to rapid global warming.

A girl's gotta dream, y'know.

3 comments:

jason s said...

Well, it's a bit of a drive and you don't have a car, but there's always Craigslist Sydney!

http://sydney.craigslist.org/

Maybe that can be your first job ... setting up Craigslist Melbourne.

Bartlebee said...

there is a craigslist in melbourne but it isn't used as much as the sf version or even in the same way - most ads are from shops or pyramid schemers.

e said...

it's much easier to just dump all of your spices into a bucket. that way you can just drop a pinch in, and plus it makes cooking much more exciting.