Laundry Day is a Very Dangerous Day

I wrote this up to Brandon a few minutes ago and afterwards, decided it was blog-worthy material. I mean, why just post about buildings and day-trips? Why not post about my every day adventures? Don't like it? Well too bad! Just kidding. I love you, reader.

So here goes:

I just got back from my first official encounter with a laundromat. Likewise, this was my first experience doing laundry in a foreign country.

"Big deal," you scoff. Let me tell you. It's not as easy as you might think.

First, I went to the small grocery store around the corner to pick up detergent. If only, if only, the woodpecker sighs, someone was there to film me. I just sort of stared at the wall of products for about 10 minutes. Then I attempted to read labels in French, then in Dutch. Then, I proceeded to open them and smell each one to see which smelled like detergent.

I'm fairly sure I bought Fabric Softener by mistake. I reconciled this by concluding that even if my clothes aren't clean, they're snuggly.

Lather, rinse and repeat the same pattern for when I actually got to the laundromat, except without the smell-test part. I tried for about 10 minutes to ram my coins in the slot (that's what he said) before realizing I needed to put my coins in another machine which dispensed a weird medallion with grooves on it. Of course. That's the coin that goes in the machine.

Anyway, 40 minutes of MP3s and 30 pages of Introduction to International Relations Theory later, it was time for the dryer... which only lets you dry clothes for 16 minutes at a time.

After that though, it was a piece of cake. Folding laundry is pretty much the same in every country. So at least I felt like a champ at that.

Now I've got a nice clean stack of underwear. And that, my friends, is what's really important in the end.