Laundry Adventures in Haus Erasmus.

So today, my roommate Abbey and I were thinking..."by golly, we're both running out of shirts, socks and underwear.  Laundry needs to be done in the near future."

Who knew it would be THAT TOUGH to do a freaking LOAD OF LAUNDRY!

So.  We get to the laundry room.  No big deal - there are 4 washers and 3 dryers (which is ridiculously backwards, because everyone knows that dryers take longer, and therefore there should be more of them than there are washers).  Hooray!  We have 3 small washing machines worth of clothes, and there happen to be three washing machines open!  We are feeling GOOD about our Laundry adventure.

2 loads of darks, 1 load of whites, in and good to go.  One of the darks machines was newer and different than the others, and of course everything is in German.  We start and pay for our laundry (with these weird cards up against the wall, forget coins) on the older machines no problem, and the cycles are about 45 minutes - appropriate, we think.  Guess on the newer machine, and it says the cycle time is 1:15 - WHOA!  That seems ridiculously long!  (For me, at least, I'm used to doing my laundry in Weatherford where all wash loads take 39 minutes and all dry loads take 50)  To remedy what I think to be a bad situation, I turn the dial to a different cycle.  Bad idea.  What is the opposite of remedy?  Destroy?  Yeah, that's what happened.

The wash stops and this message flashes across the screen in German.  Door's locked, I can't read German, I immediately go into "Oh shit, Panic mode!"  Abbey goes across the hallway to the study room to ask a student in there if she can read German.  The student tells us that the machine says "Unable to Change Cycle" or something like that.  Try the door - locked.  Try paying for it again - No good.  Try turning the machine off and then on again - Message flashes saying "Disconnected from Network."  Great.

Abbey and I go downstairs to call the Building Manager and tell him that the washing machine has taken our clothes hostage.  He informs us that he won't be back for another hour and a half, and will take a look at it then.  We finish our other two machines of wash, and stick them in the dryer, everything with them seems good.

When the manager finally shows up, he tells us that he basically doesn't want to screw up the machine any more than it already is, and he will try and get a technician in to look at it tomorrow.  Problem: We're leaving at 7:30 a.m. to go to Prague for the weekend.  His solution: Don't worry about your wet clothes in the washing machine, it's sealed so they won't mold (that makes no sense to me...).  He'll take our clothes out once the machine is fixed, put them in a basket or something, leave them to be taken care of by the chambermaids, and we can pick them up when we get back.  We inform him that we won't really be back during business hours until Wednesday, and he says that's fine.

At this point, Abbey and I have accepted the fact that there is no hope in getting that half of our darks back before Prague, and move on to the next task at hand: Those clothes of ours in the dryer.

The dryer was doing its drying thing for over an hour, so I'm feeling pretty good.  Once it's finally finished, Abbey opens the door to a CRAPTON of steam coming out of the dryer - steam = water.  Yup.  Our clothes, after an hour, are piping hot and still very, very damp.  FORGET TRYING THIS AGAIN!  I'm pretty much done with laundry for the night.

Unload our damp clothes: Check.  Where to dry them - Well, we have a big room.  We turned anything imaginable into a drying rack.  Doorknobs, lamps, drawers, chairs, doors, and even our open windows had clothes lying on them.  We fashioned a fort out of Abbey's damp sheets, which made me revisit my childhood briefly before remembering what a disaster this whole situation was.  Crappy part: The majority of my shirts were in the locked load, I found out.  Bummer.

I had yet to sample the delicacy that is the Kebab Sandwich at this point, and since Laundry was "finished" (and by finished I mean drying overnight in our room) at like 9:00 p.m., we decided that tonight was a very good night for some Kebab from a roach-coach-esque stand down the street.

Basically, they slice this sketch-ass pork (I'm guessing) meat from an upright stick, put it in a bun, put some lettuce, tomato, onion on it, gob on huge amounts of special sauce which I am not asking the ingredients for, and sprinkle on a load (literally, a load) of those pizza peppers on top.  It tasted like a heart attack, but in the best way possible.  I loved it.

Ended the night with a Kebab sandwich and a beer.  I figured it appropriate.

Lessons learned:

1. Get a drying rack for your laundry.  The dryers will not work, and at 1 euro per load, I have a feeling that running your clothes 3 times per laundry day can add up over the course of 4 months.
2. Kebab = Fantastic.  
3. When running the washing machine, DO NOT TOUCH IT once you have pressed Start.  A ghost will jump out at you, a kitten will die....bad things will happen. 
4. A beer and a heart-attack of a dinner can remedy any situation...if not remedy, at least numb...if not numb, at least distract for 10 minutes, which makes it worth it.  Plus - Beer is fantastic, and for my thoughts on heart-attack of a dinner, please see lesson number 2.