The Art of doing Laundry

I had been delaying my laundry excursion for over a week now. Finally, with literally just one pair of clean pjs left in my entire closet, I knew it was time to do the inevitable. Let me walk you through my laundry experience. You will have new found appreciation for 24 hour laundry room availabilities after reading this.

Last weekend, I went to Migros to buy laundary detergent. The beautiful thing about grocery stores is that everything is described in three languages. The tragedy is that none of them is English. So if you understand Italian, French, or German, you’re good. If, like me, the only thing you know in Italian is “Pizza”, in German is “gud”, and in French is “Je parle francais en peu”, then you are in trouble. After much deliberation and an immense amount of self-translation, I bought laundry detergent that came in pink packaging. I used the same philosophy to buy the detergent as I use to buy my handbags: It looked pretty and the design on the packaging wasn’t too busy.

Now that I had the detergent, I was ready to go. But, you can’t just waltz into a laundry room and use it here! No, sir, you can’t. There is a sign-up sheet. Yes, you heard me. A sign-up sheet that has the days of the week, and time slots in 4 hour increments listed. I signed up for the 6pm-10pm slot on Thursday. So come Thursday, I ran out of work at 5:40. Not a moment could be wasted.

Since this was my first time operating unfamiliar machinery, I divided my laundry in two groups: The “sacrificial lamb” and the “too important to die”. Now came the hard part. I went down to the laundry room, and as I suspected, instructions to operate the machinery were in – German.



The washer was pretty intuitive, so I figured it out, but the dryer was a different matter. There was nothing written on the machine; only symbols. Some of the symbols looked like what we have seen on LOST during the button pushing days. I couldn’t take the risk of my clothes shrinking, as they had once before, so I did the following. The order of this process is very important, so make sure you’re paying attention:
- Looked up the make and model of the dryer
- Came back to the apartment and found the manual for operating the dryer in German
- Downloaded the PDF and saved it on my laptop
- Went to www.translate.google.com and uploaded the document to have it translated into English
- Understood the different symbols on the dryer
- Went back down and put the dryer on the right setting

I tried this process on the “sacrificial lamb” group, and it looked like everything came out okay. But I didn’t want to take the risk so I air-dried the “too important to die” group. That’s the other thing here; everyone just leaves their clothes to dry in the laundry room. There is implicit trust that no one is going to steal your jeans or your pullovers. I decided to embrace the Swiss culture and left my clothes to air dry in the laundry room overnight. But I locked the room on my way out. And I went back down first thing in the morning to check on them. I wanted to go down at 3, 4, and 5am when I woke up thinking about them, but I resisted. The clothes still were a bit wet, but I felt like I had done enough cultural integration so I brought them back up to the apartment to dry. I will be celebrating my successful laundry endeavor with Movenpick. We’re BFFs now.