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September 08, 2004
Laundry
Hmm, I seem to have gotten behind on this journal—let me do a quick recap. Yesterday was the standard school fare with lectures from 8:30 a.m. to noon. Afterwards, I did some quick internet stuff and then hurried home to start my laundry. What followed was either:
a. a scene out of a Marx brothers movie or
b. a scene from Armageddon
First off, it took us a week to get a time reserved for laundry. The Kungsmarksvägen people have a weird system where you reserve the day spot (7 a.m. to 2 p.m.) or the night spot (2 p.m. to 9 p.m.). From 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. they turn off the electricity. Anyway, you sign up for a space (usually 7-8 days in advance) on a regular basis.
Now let me describe the laundry room: it's an actual room (there are two near our front door) with two washing machines and one dryer, plus a drying closet (more on that later). Of course, everything is in Swedish, but I managed to figure out the washing machine part of the experiment. Unfortunately, I misread some of the directions (I think, I haven't quite pinpointed where I went wrong) and added WAY too much soap, so all my clothes are stiff. But time was rapidly slipping away and I didn't have time to re-wash all the clothes, so I put a bunch up to dry in the drying closet (basically a giant closet with rods traversing the length of the closet where you can hang your clothes). The "drying" part works by a gentle stream of hot air coming through vents in the rods, plus a blower at one end of the closet. The other clothes I piled into the dryer and set to 60 minutes.
I went back upstairs to do some other stuff, and didn't come down until an hour later, just in time to take the dry clothes upstairs and switch the remaining loads. Imagine my surprise to arrive in the laundry room to discover that NONE of the clothes were dry. The clothes hanging in the drying closet were still extremely damp, and the clothes in the "dryer" were not one iota dryer than when I put them in! I hurriedly took the clothes from the dryer and added them to the drying closet, since Roya was on her way home and still had to do all of her laundry. Long story short, we ended up having to bring every single piece of clothing upstairs at 9 p.m. to hang/lay flat in our apartment.
Have you seen that USA commercial where the girl is looking for a place to lay her sweater down to dry? I think it's an advertisement for a Whirlpool drying center, but the visual is a house completely covered in clothes—drying on every available surface. Well, that was our apartment last night, but we had things 2 or 3 deep, because of a lack of places to lay things. It was comical, but at the time seemed like a nightmare.
All of this was going on simultaneously with a dinner party. We, of course, thought that our laundry would be done HOURS before the party started. So Scotty, Renaud, Ronan, Tomomi, Jessica, Roya, and I had a lovely meal of lasagna and cheesecake while frequently running downstairs to check the status of our slowly-drying clothes. Right now (24 hours after the laundry process started), I still have a good 5-6 shirts and 3 pairs of pants drying in my room. And, mind you, every piece of clothing that did dry is stiff enough to stand under its own weight…
Anyway, laundry was awful but the party was great. And today we had another round of classes. Afterwards, I came home and took a nap, having gotten a lousy night of sleep (I woke up 10-15 times worried about getting my laundry from the drying closet).
Now I'm back at school, trying to connect to the Internet before my Swedish class starts at 5:30 p.m. Clearly, I'm not going to make it, so I have no choice but to save my work, go to class, and hope there is a working connection when I'm done.
