Monday, December 03, 2007

Fridge adventures



It was a cold winter's day a few weeks ago. The snow and ice were building up outside on the streets of Kyiv and the ice was also building up in our freezer. With no way of defrosting the freezer save unplugging it and letting the water flow all over the kitchen, I took a hammer to it to try to chip away enough ice to fit in some meat. As you'll notice, this is a tiny freezer already and when the ice built up, it left only a few inches of space so that we couldn't get meat out or in. So, I took my little hammer and sat down to fix the ice problem. Now, we've been living in this apartment for almost two years now, and this has been our ice remedy the whole time.

On this fateful day, however, something went terribly wrong. I was happily chipping away when I all of the sudden heard this hissing sound. Upon further investigation, I found that I had punctured something in the bottom of the freezer part and proceeded to try to stuff the ice back into the little hole, but it was in vain. Soon, the hissing ended and the fridge started making strange sounds. Pretty scared at this point, I unplugged the fridge and went about my day, waiting for Torben to come home and fix it somehow.

Yeah, the fridge was dead. I killed our fridge with a hammer. I seriously took a hammer to our fridge and killed it. I'm a fridge murderer.

Our landlord was none too pleased with our fridge performance. Knowing it was our fault, we offered to buy a new/used fridge and we found one in a newspaper and Torben went out to the outskirts of Kiev with our friend Zhenya. The lady who was selling it came out to meet them with a parrot on her shoulder. When she heard Torben speaking English, she refused to say another word, even to Zhenya, but we got our fridge. It's 100% better than our old one (even though it smelled like fish at first and had parrot poo on the outside of it) and Torben and I were excited about it for a good 2 weeks after we got it. The niceness of the new fridge has brought about many accusations of sabatoge from Torben and friends here, but I maintain my innocence.