If you’re here for content about singing - stop reading now.
This evening marks the end of my first week in Stuttgart. And, as I was out of clean facemasks I decided to do some laundry. Now, in Germany it is apparently quite normal to have a shared laundry in the basement of your apartment block. This is something I have experienced only once in England, whilst living in student halls, and my solution then was to take my laundry home in a suitcase for my Mum. (I was a fresher, OK?!) But now I live 550 miles from my family, that is not an option.
So, I gathered up my load in a string bag and headed to the laundry room. Which is in the next door apartment block. And there was a thunderstorm. So the clothes (and I) got a good soaking before I’d even put them on! Next came the really fun bit: working out how to operate the machine.
I’m going to stick my neck out here and say my German is not bad. I studied it almost consistently from the ages of 10 - 21, and although I don’t have the fluency of someone who’s lived here, I can get by in most situations. Bank, post office, supermarket - fine. International politics, refugee crisis, adoption law - also within my remit. Washing machine handbook? Nobody covered that in school.
Our shared washing machine is operated by 1 euro coins. Luckily, I had a couple in my wallet because I had not prepared for the fact it would accept 1 euro coins, and only one euro coins. So, first I had to work out what kind of wash I could fund with two one euro coins. An hour. Excellent. Then I popped my laundry and detergent in, and headed for the coin powered meter. In go my two euros, and the clock starts ticking.
The clock gives you a couple of minutes of grace to set the machine correctly, and press start. So my two euros paid for 62 minutes of electricity, rather than 60. Generous. Having already assiduously chosen my wash, this should have been more than enough time. But of course I couldn’t get the bloody thing to start (and I still don’t know why), so there I was with the clock ticking, frantically trying to decipher the German manual and trick this machine into washing my clothes before my two minutes were up. It was like the most domestic TV quiz show you could imagine. (Wo)Man vs (washing) Machine.
Eventually, with 57 minutes remaining, the machine decided it did fancy washing my clothes after all. And so, once I was convinced that things were running along smoothly, I ventured back out into the rain and up to my apartment to fry some garlic (just so that the clothes can dry in a nice, odour-free environment!)
57 minutes later, some slightly under-spun, but clean clothes. I take them out the machine, and bid farewell to the coin meter, my nemesis, until next week.