Word Up: die Wohnung

die Wohnung f apartment, flat

   Apartment hunting in Germany is a different kettle of fish.  First of all, rental ads are written in cryptic acronyms that distill - down to the minimum number of letters - descriptions of how many rooms the apartment has (including bathrooms and kitchen), whether it's in a roof or not (chances are it is - our roof is three stories tall), and if you'll have to bring your own refrigerator.  Hiring a real estate agent to find you a rental and paying them through the nose to do so is pretty common (finally, that scene in Knocked Up where Seth Rogen uses Remax to find a bachelor pad makes sense - it all took place in Germany).  Deposits are insane - we dropped double our monthly rent as a security deposit plus first month in order to rent our place. Also, people are often expected to fit their own kitchen with everything from cabinets to stove - oh yeah, and including the kitchen sink.
    This state of affairs makes for really weird real estate reality TV shows.  Not that they are the best of TV in the first place, but I have enjoyed a good few hours of Property Virgins in my time - there's no better way to spend time that should be used to clean up your basement apartment than critiquing a stranger's impeccably decorated Arts and Crafts beachfront home with 2 bath.  From what I determined from German TV, there in this country there is also no such thing as staging, also known as prettying up an apartment for prospective buyers and any nationally syndicated television program that could possibly be posing as a buyer (If you watched Property Virgins, you'd have this vocab down pat.  That's why it's called The Learning Channel).  So, if you sit down to watch something like Vox's Mieten Wohnen Kaufen (Rent Live Own), you are essentially gearing up for 45 minutes of guided tours around empty, echoing white rooms.  The bathroom is whatever room has a toilet. The kitchen is the one with tile.
   The other thing about German real estate is that all the houses look the same.  For example, it's hard to tell if the stucco house we live in is 400 or 20 years old, or to tell the difference between our neighbourhood and one of the many "quaintly charming" towns Lonely Planet slavers over.  Basically the ideal German home is something that looks like a child's drawing - triangle roof, rectangular body, way too many little windows.  If you're rich, the drawing gets bigger.  There are no suburban Italianate villas or Tudor-style cottages, and rising from the building sites that can somehow still be found in downtown Stuttgart are even more of the same stucco monoliths.  Thus, when you are confronted with a half hour in the life of someone deciding between three essentially interchangeable white-walled apartments in three identical pastel-coloured stucco houses, the idea of real estate television really starts to fall apart at the seams.