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| Angelika/Mike Schilli |
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Angelika Recently, we were sitting with our German friends Conny and Roland, who have only been in San Francisco since last year, and we started talking about cleaning American windows. Now, this might seem a bit absurd to you, but we debated for quite a while. American windows are designed differently from German ones. They don't simply open inward with a lever; instead, they slide sideways or, as known from American TV shows, from bottom to top. This makes cleaning the outer panes almost impossible. Unless, of course, the window is adjacent to a fire escape or a balcony, where you can stand armed with cleaning supplies.
At first, I was puzzled by the question: How do Americans do it? Aren't they cleaning windows? Does a window cleaner come to the house? An American friend enlightened us back then. The windows can be removed from their frames. For cleaning, they are placed on the floor. This sounds brilliantly simple, but it isn't, because our windows, for example, are relatively high, and removing and reinstalling them becomes a juggling act. You have to be extremely careful that the window standing around in the apartment doesn't tip over and break the glass, as has happened to us before. In our apartment, there's an additional difficulty: We can only remove the sliding window; the other one is permanently fixed. And since we don't want to become part of the statistic "Most accidents happen at home," we have to use all sorts of tricks, like scrubbing with extendable telescopic rods. As you can tell, we don't clean our windows often. Only when the view from our windows gets clouded by a gray haze do we embark on this adventure.
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