Monday, March 08, 2010

Barbie's dream home

Having a house will probably not happen in the next five years, but hopefully the hubs and I will both have some good work experience under our belts by that time comes and we'll be prepared for house-buying and other next steps. I can picture two dream houses. One house is a cottage-type dwelling, with a garden patio, gynormous kitchen with a deep Italian-tiled sink, in a hipster area of town, a mix of authentic, established locals and cool, social newcomers, in a place with a moderate climate (Chile, California, ok I guess DC but only because there are jobs), with access to a farmers market, and some kind of body of water nearby like a lake or stream. It would be a simple, comfortable, cozy house, and it would smell like espresso and nutella all the time.

The other dream house is a vacation house that I can transport from place to place at whim, a pretty bare-bones place, probably made of concrete, that contains a sink, some hammock hooks in the ceiling, a tiled bathroom fitted with a toilet and a bidet, an outdoor shower with a view to something (ocean, lake, valley, mountains), and a wireless internet connection. I could put the house on a Caribbean island when I felt like going to the beach, deep in the red-dusted interior of Brazil when I felt like escaping a harsh winter, in the Philippines when I wanted to visit my grandma and learn Tagalog, somewhere in Chile so I could spend time with my in-laws and we could all relax together, and anywhere else my friends happen to be so I can visit them. I think of all the impossible things I could want, this crazy dream house is it.

Maybe I could construct a chain of these dwellings all over the world and rent them out to people trying to live the dream. There would be some type of reservation system involved, and the local people that live in those areas could earn money constructing/maintaining/cleaning the dwellings. Yeah, leave it to an American to try to concoct a way to McDonaldize a dream like that.

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