A Piece of My Growing Heart

We walked into our small, Frankfurt apartment, my colleague and I. It was only my second day in Germany so EVERYTHING was new and exciting to me, down to the way the toilets flushed. The apartment consisted of a small living room, a tiny bedroom, an even tinier kitchen--complete with a washing machine--and a decently-sized bathroom. I skipped around the apartment, checking everything out. We even had a balcony that overlooked the small grassy area outside. My colleague looked at a binder.
"It says we should have bikes down in the Keller [cellar]," she said.
"Really? Where's that?" I asked.
"Downstairs." She grabbed the keys. "Come on, let's go check it out."
We lived on the second floor of the thirteen story building, so we walked down the stairs to the ground level, and then two more down. The entire time I was simply fascinated by the fact that there was that much building beneath the building. We opened the door and went into the cellar. The ground was cold; pipes and wires lined the ceiling. Doors and doors lined the walls. Little, blue lights lit the hallway, but not enough to chase away every shadow. I found it all a little creepy, but at the same time, extremely cool.
"Wow! What in the world is this place?" I said.
"Every building in Germany has one," my colleague explained.
"It's so creepy! I should've brought my camera down here. I didn't know it'd be this cool!"
We walked by numbered doors until we found the one that said 52--the one that belonged to our apartment. Unfortunately, the key was not on our bundle of keys, so we never discovered what lay behind that metal door.
Later I learned that every apartment had the option of including a cellar in their lease contract. Some cellars were creepier--and more spider-ier--than others. Some had metal cages, others had prison-cell-like boxes with wooden bars. Some wound around like a maze beneath the building, with narrow corridors and padlocked doors. Lightbulbs hung down from twisted wires, and some were perfectly mounted on the ceiling. Some smelled of lemon-scented cleaner, and others of mold. German cellars were the perfect place to store stuff you didn't know what to do with, stuff you only used once a year, old furniture, broken things, and sometimes it just bore your recyclables until the designated day they needed to be put out on the street.
One thing is certain: the cellars in Germany are filled with a cornucopia of mysterious treasures.