What is it with us and kitchens, anyway?

Most of you probably know what happened a year ago last Monday.  Three weeks after we moved to Syria, Nik and Alice had a fire back in Medford that precipitated a full kitchen remodel and a major smoke damage cleanup operation throughout the first floor. The takeaway: do not leave frying calamari unattended.

Our Medford kitchen, a year ago

Fast forward one year.  In our apartment, three weeks here in Ethiopia, and Andreas is using our Chinese knock-off Italian-style stovetop espresso maker to brew a cup of coffee for Alekka to take on the bus to school.  Typically it takes a few minutes to heat up, so Andreas goes into the dining area to organize his briefcase when BLAM!  The unmistakeable sound of an explosion. Coffee on the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Pieces of the metal coffeemaker have blasted all the way to the other end of the room.  Yikes.

The corner above the stove caught the worst of it, but the whole kitchen will have to be repainted.

The good news is that no one was in the kitchen to get hit with flying shrapnel or boiling water.

It will be stovetop camp coffee for us from now until our shipment arrives.  Then French press, all the way.