This week, one of the other Drexel students and I decided to do our laundry. I guess a more accurate term would be to “try” to do it. In the dorms, you have to use washing/ drying machine coins that are a Euro each. Our adventure starts with us trying to find those coins. There was a sign by the elevator that said they are only available from 8-9am in “the building next door”. It took us several days to figure out where they meant by that. Plus, the guy in charge never stayed until 9, so it was very difficult to get a hold of him. But after several more days of trying, we finally were able to get a few coins to wash our clothes.
The adventure continued when we tried to buy laundry detergent. We went into the supermarket by the dorm and bought some sort of cheap detergent that looked like something we could get at home. Excited, we went back to the dorm to finally start doing laundry, until my roommate told me that what we actually bought was fabric softener. Of course. So, we needed to get one of our German speaking friends to help us return that liquid and help us pick out the right one. This again took a couple of days.
Finally, it came the day when we brought down all of our stuff into the basement and were ready to do our laundry. There are three little washing machines, two decent sized drying machines, and a huge room to hang wet clothes. Seems easy enough, we thought, and then noticed that every word on the machines is in German. Once again, Germany proved to us how much it sucks to not speak the language. Luckily, there was another student in the room doing his laundry, so he helped us translate all of the different options we could choose from. I had no idea there were so many! Thankfully he was there to help, because we would have probably never noticed that the default setting lasted for over two hours! Yikes. But at the end of the day, we finally figured out the machines and are now able to use them. I hope.