Shutters

Every day that we're in Freiburg, I look around at the beautiful historic edifices; the flower boxes and carefully tended gardens bright with yellow, red, and fuchsia blossoms; the stately Jugendstil apartment houses in our neighborhood, with their swooping arches and stained glass windows; the tables of colorful fruits and vegetables at the farmers' markets; the dark green pine-covered hills of the Schwarzwald; the pleasant parks and playgrounds, filled with kids of all ages; the standing wave patterns of the water in the cobblestone-lined canals of the Altstadt; and the crunchy brown leaves and Lindenbaum flowers fluttering down from the trees as summer merges into fall; and I think: I really need new glasses. If it gets bad enough, I'll blog about finding an optician in Freiburg.

As lovely as the sights are in Freiburg, people here don't necessarily want to see them--or perhaps people themselves don't want to be seen--after about 4pm. Thankfully, shutters offer a not-entirely-cumbersome way to shut out the noisy, harsh, outside world, allowing residents to create impenetrable, cave-like atmospheres in their very own homes. The amazing thing is that shutting out all the light can actually be charming (at least from the outside) when you do it with old-fashioned, functional shutters. Check it out, suburban America--shutters that actually open and close!

Of course, closing such shutters requires opening your windows, which you might not want to do in the middle of the winter. To address this problem, humankind invented the hideously ugly custom-made polymer shutter, which you can close over the outside of your window by pulling on a strap inside the house.

To compensate for the resultant dungeon-like darkness, humankind invented the €14.95 lamp at Ikea.