Deciphering appliances and other enigmas

Saturday night I embarked on actually cooking something (or at least heating up food instead of ordering in). I had ordered a few prepared meals from SuperValu in my grocery delivery — Chicken & Broccoli Bake, Beef Lasagne, Cottage Pie, Classic Beef Stew. The portions are fairly generous, and not that expensive: €6 for a family meal (2+ portions) and €4 for an individual meal, or $5-$7 given the current exchange rate of around 1.17 Euros to USD. Seems equivilient to what I’d pay at Trader Joe’s for something similar.

The kitchen was renovated with IKEA appliances and cabinetry, which is as expected, although I’ve never actually used an IKEA oven before… the iconography leaves one guessing. In addition, in order to operate the oven (or cooker), one has to flip an on/off switch on the wall for the electricity. An aside: most electrical outlets also have an on/off switch, presumably to save electricity when appliances are not in use; it’s common to unplug appliances and radiators when not in use. At any rate, there are two red switches on the wall above the stove, one says cooker (oven?) and the other is unlabeled (stovetop?). After flipping both of them on and looking up the IKEA oven symbols online, I managed to get the oven going and popped in the Chicken & Broccoli Bake dish (the soonest prepared meal to expire). The oven actually has multiple convection / heating / grill options, and the dish came out quite well. I had also unpacked the Peugout electric salt & pepper grinders (which my friend Olga had gifted years ago), which added some familiarity to my meal routine, along with some cool brew iced tea I made.

…and after dinner I enjoyed some Guinness for “dessert.”

I still don’t have internet in the apartment, hopefully the box/modem will be delivered tomorrow… in the meantime I decided to try streaming some video using my phone’s data plan and then view it on the TV. This took some juggling of devices… I used my phone for the network data connection, then tethered my iPad to my iPhone hotspot network, then connected the iPad to the TV via an HDMI adaptor and cable. At first this seemed to work, but whenever a video started to play in full screen mode, only the audio would play (no picture). I tried swapping HDMI ports on the TV, but to no avail. Then I decided to try my laptop (which has a different HDMI adaptor), and it worked!!!  

In order to watch U.S. content on HBO Max / Hulu / Netflix, I reactivated the VPN serivce I had used during previous trips to obtain a U.S. IP address and thereby bypass the copyright or whatever other regional restrictions in place. My first entertainment selection of the evening was South Park’s Pandemic Special, which lived up to expectations for a biting and crude parody of the state of the world now. I also caught up on other comedy talk shows such as Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and Real Time with Bill Maher. Already I feel a relief having some distance between me and the happenings in the U.S. The additional plot twist of Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis and transfer to a hospital, one month before the election, has only added to the surrealism of the times. My Irish landlord sent me a meme with a captioned photo of Trump that read: “”Thoughts are prayers are with the virus at this difficult time.” I think that reflects the sentiment of most people here.

The other technological challenge was figuring out how to do laundry. I addition to the standard under-the-kitchen-counter European style washing machine, the apartment also came with a clothes dryer! The symbols and various temperatures in Celsius on the control dials were another enigma to solve, but thankfully I found instruction manuals online that made it fairly easy to figure out how to use them. The capacity is much smaller, and here a standard wash cycle takes 3 hours as compared to perhaps to 1 hour or slightly longer in the U.S. I did a couple of loads and and happy to report that my clothes seem to have come out unscathed.