Exciting Moments in a Newly Implanted Belfortians Life

I have had countless exciting days since I have moved to Belfort such as finally finding an apartment we could call home for the next 5 months (4 now! Wow how time flies!). It wasn't the beautiful European style apartment I had imagined myself living in with a wrought iron balcony that I would have my morning coffee and read the paper on, if I drank coffee or read the newspaper much but I have grown to love my apartment regardless of the boring ultra modern exterior with bright and I mean seriously bright red balconies and grey-blue exterior.

Actually receiving the furniture so we could live in the apartment was also another great joy. It is a bit depressing knowing you have an apartment but cannot live there although what is even more depressing is actually moving into your apartment and not having the essentials to actually live there. You know the essentials are on their way, making their way through some part of the deep blue sea but having yet to have arrived, it was quite a costly adventure on our part but at least we could finally stop eating out! Trips to Ikea ensued and we became the very proud owners of a rolling cutting board/storage and an adorable cafe sidewalk in Paris table and chairs for our balcony along with some other its and bits. Some of the biggest excitements though have been the actual arrival of all of our stuff. The wondrous container from Turkey! It was like Christmas when it arrived. Everything was new and shiny and fun to play with...well that is until I had to wash it all..by HAND! Ooh but the food, so much food! We had every kind of food imaginable from nuts to bulgar and rice to canned tomato paste and stuffed grape leaves. We had soups and desserts and a huge can of olive oil. We have enough tea to last us for several years! (Click on some of the pictures to see the full photo)
Those two boxes are filled entirely with food...the food in the other photo is additional food that was not in those two other boxes.

As you can see, I am having quite a lot of fun here with all these new and exciting things. Hand washing dishes every single day has become something I greatly look forward to not having to do but somehow we are left with dirty dishes if I do not do them. Laundry, another fine example of one of the great joys of life in Belfort! I wait for my very "efficient" washing machine to wash one load of laundry, roughly about 45 minutes then I hang each and every individual piece of laundry from the towels and sheets to the rugs, socks, underwear, shirts and pants. I hang socks! That is what I do. I uncrinkle the socks and I place them neatly on the drying rack so they can dry. This is one of the great things Belfort and my apartment have to offer me. A learning experience and each and every day, I learn more. For example, last week, I learned how to create a pocket shape so my laundry will billow in the wind hopefully creating enough friction and beating between the fabric to soften them from board stiff to paper soft. I also learned that our square plates do not fit well in our drying rack which is causing a lot of stress and headache as one day the domino effect will happen when one slides out and push them all to a shattering death on the floor. By the way, FYI to anyone considering getting an apartment with all tile and wood floors, beware! Somehow hundreds of particles of fuzz land on our floor everyday, I am assuming from other people hanging their laundry out to dry and everyday, I have to vacuum only to have more fuzz and particles on the floor by the end of the day. Today, I have vacuumed twice by the way and it is only 1:45 in the afternoon. I mopped earlier and I didn't want my pristine floor to be dirty. We don't wear shoes in the house yet somehow our feet the bottom of our nice clean feet begin to look a bit dirty after a few hours on our floor.


I love Belfort and all the great learning experiences and exciting times I have. It is truly a joy to live here (I am not actually being sarcastic). This is the only time in my life in which I will probably ever wash all my dishes by hand and hang dry all of my clothes (I will even go to work everyday and let Soner stay at home and do all those things if somehow we cannot seem to have those little daily conveniences in the future!) and I will always be able to appreciate all the hard work and effort that goes in to it and whenever someone tells me I don't know what work is, I will tell them to try running a household without the conveniences you have grown accustomed to and then, I will show them my cut up, dried out hands.

A New Year with more traveling and growing and laughing

So yesterday, Soner and I celebrated our two year anniversary. We have been dating for two whole years. It is amazing and I do not remember the time flying by so quickly. i feel as if we haven't even been dating a year! I had a lot of fun preparing for it. I bought these great big heart shaped leaves (I thought they were Elephant Ears but they are not) to show that obviously, my heart and love for Soner is much much larger than his as everyone should know and I set to work on cooking and baking A-L-L D-A-Y L-O-N-G!!


I cooked and I baked, cooked and baked,..literally going back and forth between several different things at once. I prepared bell peppers and celery for Tabouli (it is a "clean eating" recipe) and also prepared eggplants and potatoes (I am learning...the eggplants and potatoes are for tonight's dinner actually but it said I could prepare some of it ahead so I did) while at the same time trying to figure out where in the world I was going to find baking soda! That was my last missing ingredient. You know how everyone says, well duh!, of course they will have that in France, well they don't! They don't have baking soda or sour cream or any differing kinds of heavy or whipped cream as far as I can tell. They don't have popcorn you can buy in a box with more than one package and they don't have what we call steak tenderloin. They have Filet and Faux Filet and Entrecote,..all of which I cannot tell you exactly what it is because supposedly Faux Filet is Sirloin and supposedly Entrecote is Sirloin,..why would you have Sirloin and Sirloin right next to each other in the grocery store?? What they do have is about 8 different types of flour used for a bajillion different types of things whether you want cake flour, pastry flour, bread flour, cookie flour and on and on and on and half a row in the cold section devoted entirely to butter (Think long Walmart aisles!)! I had quite a time the other day looking up all the ingredients I would need for the next few days and then another hour and a half going through the grocery store trying to find them. They do not put tomato paste and tomato puree next to the tomatoes in the canned vegetable section by the way..I am not quite sure where they put them actually but they are not there and they do not put baking soda in the baking section because they do not cook with baking soda because it is "old fashioned" and they keep their melting and baking chocolate with the chocolate, not with the baking. You can actually find (Soner joked the day before to look for baking soda in the toothpaste section since toothpaste is made with baking soda sometimes and he was right!) baking soda at the pharmacy and luckily, I realized this about 20 minutes before they closed for their two hour lunch break yesterday.

So anyways back to the cooking, after I had prepared the ingredients for Tabouli and for today's meal, I began the long day of making Red Velvet Cake from scatch. I am quite the little Betty Crocker these days it appears. Not only did I make Red Velvet Cake from scratch, I also made the buttermilk to go in it! (Ok so it was just adding one tablespoon of vinegar to milk and letting it sit for 10 minutes but still!) I then continued to make Buttercream Frosting and the actual cake..I ran out of food coloring though so it is more a brown-red than red but oh well...maybe next time! By the way, if anyone can tell me how to sift flour properly (Mom!) please let me know. It seems like it would make quite a mess and while I sifted it, I did make a mess and I don't even know if it was worth "sifting." I prepared my cake, baked it, then placed it in the fridge to cool then came the real fun! I was making Red Velvet Cake Balls! I crumbled up all of my cake minus a little that I cut hearts out of (again to show that of course my heart is bigger and more full of love than Soner's) and mixed in the buttercream frosting to make tons and tons of little balls which I then froze. (This is quite a long process by the way.) After frozen, I coated those suckers in melted chocolate and again let them cool. I rock by the way! I made awesome Red Velvet Cake Balls! They were delicious and wonderful and perfect.




Yesterday was quite a long day of cooking but it was all so much fun and worth it because Soner seemed to really enjoy it. We had steak skewers I had marinated before and the Tabouli for dinner with a Eggplant-Yogurt sauce I had made also which came out very lumpy but didn't taste terrible. And for dessert the wonderful Red Velvet Cake Balls. It was perfect AND I took lots and lots of pictures of the baking process so Enjoy!

The Cravings Begin!

You move to a new place, everything is going well then BAM! you suddenly get a craving so bad for something you didn't even eat that much to begin with back home. Chinese and Mexican food! Ok so I am always craving Mexican food but Soner and I have made it our new obsession to try to find a great Chinese and Mexican restaurant in France but we have not been very successful. In Chicago, we were always on that quest for a great Mexican restaurant but there was only one that we knew of so while it was good, we did not frequent it more than once every two months or so and we NEVER ate Chinese! So we have traveled to Besancon (about an hour away), we have traveled to Zurich (about an hour and a half away), to Strasbourg (about 1 and a half hours), to Mulhouse (30 minutes) and all the way to Lyon (3 hours away!) and what do all these places have in common?? The quest for Chinese and Mexican food! At times, it has seemed we simply visited these places just to check out the food and it was not your traditional French cuisine we were checking out even though we should have as each place seems to have their own speciality food. We spent much of our 2 day weekend in Lyon looking for a Mexican and Chinese restaurant. Before we left Belfort, I actually looked up Asian grocery stores so we could buy chopsticks and maybe a little food as Soner kept stocking up on noodles and soy sauce in Belfort and it was never resulting in an actual meal.

So off we go to Lyon with an address in hand for an Asian super market and voila, there is one and several around it! We are in the Chinatown of Lyon it seems! It is all Asian restaurants, stores, markets, etc. It is amazing. Who would have thought all the way in France, they would have a Chinatown in the large cities also. We bought chopsticks, noodles, sake and little packages for mixing up some good Chinese food... it was all in English! As I have always imagined, Asian food seems to be only near and dear to those in the United States and in actual Asia as evidenced by the English labels on everything in every supermarket we went to in a very large French city.

We did find ourselves a little Tex-Mex restaurant, actually called El Tex-Mex and while it wasn't wonderful but how many Mexican restaurants have you actually eaten at that have been? So I would say it was about right on par with some of the Mexican places I like to eat at... it was lacking in the mandatory, must have section though... we did not have chips and salsa on our table! And we ordered "guacamole" and what we got was a big blob of green stuff (it looked like the stuff we got out of the jar from the grocery store...in fact, Soner swears it is) and about 10 chips (also appeared to be from the Doritos chips you can buy at the grocery store that are lightly dusted with chili powder). It was a bit disappointing but at least we sort of quenched our craving for Mexican a little. Sunday, we continued our quest for great Asian food, specifically Spicy Kung Pao Chicken! We had a recommendation from the hotel concierge but it turned out to actually be a Moroccan restaurant and we passed by a really great looking Mexican restaurant but restaurants close around 2 or 2:30 after lunch so we were turned away.

This is what we found ourselves doing in Lyon, on our great weekend excursion away, not looking at the huge cathedrals built as early as the 14th century or even shopping (although I did convince Soner to take me some place to buy a yoga mat and its not really even a yoga mat..we do not have one in Belfort). The entire time we were in Lyon, we searched for great non-French food! We took a few great photos of staircases and tourists which by the way, all the way from South Louisiana we met a large group of... LSU Law Students! (Soner thought it would be funny to take a photo of the big group of tourists looking all about and then we heard them speak and I commented about their great southern accent then we saw the Purple!.. the shirts and hats and jackets! You will always know LSU fans, they love to always have at least one item on them that shouts to the world we are LSU Tigers, hear us roar! So that was exciting.) It was a great trip that I will always remember for its food!

Which brings me back to last night. I made Soner the Chinese food he had been craving and it was absolutely delicious! I chopped up broccoli, carrots, threw in some baby corn with some chopped up chicken, threw in the syrupy brown sauce from the Asian supermarket and we had a wonderful Chinese meal complete with noodles and chopsticks. I only wish all my meals would turn out so perfect. So anyway, thats that! Sorry I am a bit long winded in all of my posts! I'll add pictures to this post this afternoon or tomorrow!
"Place des Terreaux"
Another place that was built by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. France seems to be covered by places built by this guy or maybe it is just where I live. He built the Lion in Belfort and this statue as well as...what we all know and love and see as one of the great United States symbols, The Statue of Libery!





Water Fountain on Rue de la Republic
Lyon's major Pedestrian Street in Presqu'ile












City Hall in Lyon
City Hall is located in the square with the Bartholdi Statue and Palais Saint-Pierre















Basilique Notre-Dame-de-Fourvière












Cathédrale St-Jean
Built between the 12th and 15th Century

What do I do all day??

Yesterday I got absolutely nothing accomplished but I was busy all day. I have no idea what I did with my time other than chop up some parsley and strawberries! I still try to think back and I can think of absolutely nothing else I did except check the internet from time to time looking for a great little weekend trips we can take in the future. France has ANOTHER holiday in July. A nice two day one and this time, we will be prepared. I really wish we had been prepared the last 2-day and 1-day holidays! It would have been great. We could have done so much. Now it looks like the holidays may be dying down a little bit but there is still so much for us to see and do before the summer is over and it begins to get chilly. So for our 2-day holiday in July we have decided to go to Turkey to an all-inclusive resort. We went to one while I was in Istanbul in October and it was so much fun, you didn't need to bring your wallet or anything and you got to eat all day long and lounge by the beach. It was wonderful. They had great nightly entertainment and the whole thing was very nicely packaged and priced. It was like a cruise but without the moving. But there are also so many other places I want to visit and I don't know if a weekend is time enough to visit them. In France, EVERYTHING is closed on Sunday unless it is a touristy area but even so, a lot of places are still closed. This happens in Switzerland and Germany also. I think Italy is the only country that seems to have a welcome, all is open here sign out for us weekend adventurers.

GE would have made it so much easier on us if they had rented us a car for the duration of Soner's stay. It would not be so terrible if renting a car was not quite so expensive. For a day's rental, it costs 60 or so euros, almost $85! Quite pricey for someone who is used to renting a car for $20-$30 a day without having a really great deal! Supposedly you can take a train everywhere but is the train going to drop me off along every vineyard I want to see and every country side I want to drive through with the option of staying really late? We rented a car this past weekend for Saturday and Sunday with a Monday morning return because the rental places are not open on Sunday. A bit of a bummer because you have to pay for 2 day rental then no matter what. If we want to go drive through the wine routes, we have to pay 96 Euros at a minimum with Soner's discount. It is incredible to me! I hate it. I've thought about trying to rent a car just for the Saturday and return it Saturday evening but no can do. They close at noon on Saturdays! You get a better deal if you go for longevity! 15 day car rental at Avis without any discounts is 578 US$! That is only $38.50 a day, only 27 Euros. How amazingly different is that compared to the 60 Euros they want you to pay a day for a weekend! In Europe, they seem to want to charge you an extraordinary amount of taxes also. $151 of taxes is tacked on to that 15 day car rental. It is very depressing.

So anyway, on with my day. It rained all afternoon but I need to run out and get some lettuce for our new Monday night tradition. It is no longer Monday night Pizza night as it has been for quite a long time BUT Monday night Salad night! Woohoo! A great big salad each in our great big bowls. So I went out to brave the rain and check the mail and I had a nice little notice saying I had a package at the post office. (Big smiles!) Its raining and I am getting wet but yay, I have a package at the post office. I practically skipped down there only to be met with a crowded room full of people. Oh well, this can't possibly be hard. At least I knew the word in french for package, "colis." So I waited in the line, if you could really call it a line, that said "colis" over the window. I kept getting looks from this man in front of me though, I mean I know I am drop dead gorgeous with frizzy rain hair and no makeup on but is that any reason to stare! Eventually...he spoke! And he spoke English. Apparently I was not supposed to wait in line but to take a number and wait for my number to show up on the board. Thank you for the kindness of strangers or else I would have been waiting there until they closed trying to figure out why I had not been helped yet. And I got a super cool looking box. So nice and pretty and it brightened up the rainy day. I only wish it had not been raining or else I would not have put it into my bag to keep it from getting wet but I would have carried it proudly back to home so everyone could see how cool I was.

The contents were awesome! I was planning on baking a cake tomorrow for Soner and the pirouettes will go perfectly around the outside of the cake (I have to do something creative with them or else we will just sit here and eat them until they are gone!) and thank you Mom for trying to keep me healthy with Almonds instead of Cashews although if you saw my refrigerator, you would know you have absolutely nothing to fear! On Saturday mornings, they have a market and we bring my rolling cart and buy up a whooolllleee lot of fruits and vegetables. There is not a space that is not taken up with fruits and vegetables right now. We have eggplants, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, parsley, broccoli, carrots, 3 different types of peppers, bell peppers, apples, pears, strawberries, raspberries, lemons, limes, bananas, onions, garlic and potatoes and I think that may have been all we bought the other day. We actually eat all of those things too! We will hopefully finish it all by the weekend. Last week we bought a few less items, just tomatoes, a couple types of peppers, pears, appleas, limes, onions, garlic and potatoes and we ran out by Thursday. Anyway, all the goodies in the box were wonderful and it was like Christmas. I keep having a lot of "like Christmas" moments lately. New apartment, furniture, all the goodies from Turkey, all the goodies from US. Its wonderful.

So that was my exciting day. We finished the day off with our nice big salads and strawberries and ice cream.

It's a good start

I have been trying to pay more attention to things I cook and how I cook them so I can possibly remember for the future without having to rely on a recipe. Of course, when I cook, its kind of like when I use GPS, I rely fully on the recipe and cannot tell you how I got to the end result unless I am holding that little piece of paper in my hand. (Jennifer, you know what I mean! You can't drive around Dallas without your near and dear GPS even though you've been there a million times!) So today I will begin writing what I cook everyday in a little journal along with whatever Soner cooks as he has a knack for these things, doesn't use a recipe AND his meals are ALWAYS wonderful. Last night we had chicken salads and Soner prepared the chicken. He mixed olive oil, soy sauce, minced ginger and chicken seasoning together and the chicken tasted great. I would have never put those things together. To prepare chicken, I would put olive oil and a bunch of spices hoping it would come out decent and it never does. The chicken always tastes like chicken, exactly how it smells when you take it out raw,..not like something I want to enjoy and savor.

So I was talking to mom last night and she asked something to the effect of if we were staying in very much and cooking. OF COURSE! I cook every single day during the week and let me tell you, the first week, it was not easy trying to figure out what to cook for dinner so I could impress Soner with my great cooking skills and rely only on the oven and microwave to cook and saute things with only a cookie sheet and broiler pan for the oven, some steak knives and the 2 sets of forks and knives I stole from the hotel. It would've been great if we could've just left and gone out for dinner (actually I was getting really tired of having to read the menus in French and take 20 minutes to order something that was not as delightful and what I thought it would be). Since we have upgraded our cooking utensils since then with our great big shipment from Turkey, we are now a fully equiped wonderful kitchen! Yippee. I love it. So anyway, below are some pictures of some of the foods I have made.. a cake (it was a box mix! but I had to read it all in french and I added my own twist to it..I tried making a Boston Creme Pie but the store did not have instant pudding like it called for and I did not have a pot to cook the pudding, only a mixing bowl so I had to go with a ready to eat pudding in a container and the recipe called for semisweet chocolate to melt but yet again I could not find melting chocolate but did find a wonderful little chocolate in a microwavable pouch that could be melted. So I baked my cake, froze it in the freezer (Thanks Mom!), cut it across the middle and voila, I had space for my ready to eat pudding to go then I topped the top with my great microwavable melting chocolate and tada! a somewhat terrible Boston Creme Pie was born!...it wasn't that terrible but my melting chocolate hardened after it cooled and the pudding could have been a little thicker)
This is grilled eggplant, tomatoes, mozzarella cheese and basil stacked on top of each other with a balsamic vinegar sauce. Not exactly a difficult recipe but it was still very good and healthy.
This is steak topped with tomatoes, peppers and onion (part of the left over "salsa" I had made earlier) with rice and a phyllo dough pouch I filled with tomatoes, asparagus and cheese. (Ha, this little pouch was a very exciting accomplishment for me! It was probably one of the first times, I tried to think what would be good together and made it without a recipe telling me how..not exactly since it only has 3 ingredients but exciting for me nonetheless!)
This last photo is of the brunch Soner made for us. He was trying to put together a creamy shrimp fondue of sorts like the appetizer you can get from Cheesecake Bistro. I think it turned out better than the one at Cheesecake Bistro. He used shrimp, cream, milk, cheeses and some spices. I am amazed everyday how creative he is and how he can figure out how to put these things together so they work. He is like people who play an instrument, they can hear the song once and be able to play it from ear exactly.

Catching Up!

I will spend the next few days trying to play catch up! The last two posts I wrote last week and are for the week before. In that time, we have traveled to Besancon, Zurich, Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Lyon and Beaune as well as drove through the country side to see more scenery. We have also received an entire apartment full of food, dishes and linens. I am happy to say Soner now has 3 times the amount of clothing I have! I have been cooking for almost 2 weeks now and have about 5 cuts and scraps adorning my hands from relearning to cut vegetables and grating cheese. It does not work to grate your fingers. Contrary to belief, it does not actually add much flavor to your cheese but rather becomes a constant reminder every time you run water over it that the cheese grater is not meant for skin. I will begin working my way backwards from most recent events and for now, I will post pictures of our lovely apartment as it is being assembled!
Our Kitchen and Living Room!

Our Kitchen, Living Room and 2 Bedrooms as the furniture is being put together.

And our Living Room with furniture in it.


I'll add better photos and more photos later! I think if you click on the photos you can enlarge them but I am not so sure.

Exciting Tuesdays!

As far as days go, Tuesday was very exciting for me. I took my first bus ride and my first train ride and finally had someone look at my passport! We had to return the rental car to the airport Tuesday morning so we start out, make it to the Basel, Mulhouse, Frieburg Airport, also known as Europort and go to return the car. Unfortunately we tried to return it to the Mulhouse side of the airport, the French side, and are told we cannot return the car to the Avis on the French side since we rented it from the Avis on the Basel, Switzerland Side. I could literally see the other side of the airport from where I was standing so lets say about 3 city blocks to the other end of the airport. We had to get back in the car, on to the highway, drive through customs and drive a little further then finally exit back to the airport and make out way to the Avis on that side. Blah! That took too much time. After we had to take a bus to Basel so we could catch a train to go back to Belfort. It was very exciting with a lot of pretty scenery. As we were crossing from Switzerland into France, the custom officers came by to check our passports and they asked where we are traveling to and me, all excited, said to France! Soner quickly stepped in and said Belfort. Ha if we were in the United States and I had said that when I am obviously heading that way and it is the only place for me to go then the other person would have thought I was being sarcastic and would not have been too happy with me. I wonder what the French officers thought...

I also made my first meal in the apartment. We have 2 forks and 2 knives, some steak knives, three plates I bought at Ikea, one cookie sheet, 5 small tupperware-like containers and a microwave and stove. I made a lovely meal with a starter of chips and homemade salsa (tomatoes, onions and hot peppers) then for the dinner we had...tomatoes, onions and hot peppers grilled in the oven. Oh and some bread and some microwavable shrimp but they didn't turn out so great. It was a very exciting day in our household!

About 2 weeks late!

So it has been quite a few days since I have updated my blog but we have been moving and we do not have internet! I never realized how much it would affect me not to have internet for a few days but it seems business is suddenly picking up right at the exact time we are moving and not only that because I am asleep half the time business is going on, emails go unanswered and I have a set of unhappy customers. I guess that is life. Now back to my here and now life!

The elevators are small here. Supposedly they fit 8 people but I have been in one with only 3 and it was a bit too personal for me but they are pretty great in my building. They have a nice full length mirror so I can check out how my outfit turned out before I step out of the building...it does have a negative though, can you imagine having an elevator full of people and have the full length mirror? It would look and begin to feel a little like there were that many more people in the tiny little space and it may become even more claustrophobic. Anyway, they do not seem to have service elevators to move all of your wonderfully large furniture so the poor moving guys had to take each and every piece of furniture apart.. Ok I say each and every but I guess it was really just the wardrobe but it had like 20 pieces to it and it is huge! It is over 6 feet long and takes up an entire wall of our "closet" room and yes, we have a "closet" room. It just makes good sense. We have a two bedroom apartment and if we had only one bedroom and tried to cram the wardrobe, dresser, bed and two night tables in there, we would not be able to open the doors to the wardrobe or the dresser and I imagine we wouldn't quite be able to get into the room either. Our "closet" room is great though. We have this huge wardrobe, our dresser, a full length mirror and ironing board and the ironing board never has to be put away or hidden because it's in the "closet" room! It is perfect.

Anyway, the move that was supposed to take about 2 hours, took about 4 and a half hours but we got everything we wanted. We really got lucky and I think someone must really like Soner because I'd be willing to be we got way more than most people AND all the living room furniture matches, all the bedroom furniture matches, everything matches. It is wonderful. Of course our hours and hours of cleaning the floors seem to have gone to waste though. The men bringing the furniture in had really dirty shoes and rolled all the stuff in on a cart with really dirty wheels and I swear I have vacuumed every single day and swifted the entire apartment 2 or 3 times and I am still finding my white slippers (that I washed yesterday and were sparkling clean again) lightly covered in a black dirt on the bottom. It is driving me a bit insane.

All in all, our moving day experience was pretty great and I ended up pretty tired. Soner went back to work after the movers left and I cleaned all the furniture. At one point I thought I was big and cool and could change the doors on the refridgerator to open on the other side. Guess what? I am not all cool and handy apparently. I unscrewed the top door at the top and bottom and reached down to do the bottom one and it isn't a screw! It's that hectagon thing and it was so tiny I didn't have a hope in the world of trying to get it off. So back together the fridge goes and right as I am nearing completion and I am beginning to feel proud again that I was able to sucessfully put it back together, the door slipped out of my hands, fell to the floor onto a bucket half full of soapy water and finally settling on the floor in a pool of water that covered the entire kitchen. Way to go Alicia! At least we know the kitchen floor is clean! Other than scrapping some rather thick chunks of skin off my hands while cleaning, the rest of the day of cleaning and moving went off without a hitch. At the end of day we had pizza on our new couch and watched NCIS in French then headed back to the hotel for our final nights stay.