Laundry Day

It stops being a vacation once you have to do laundry. It’s the moment where you realize can’t just throw your dirty clothes in a suitcase, hop on a plane, and leave it all till later. I did laundry a little over a week ago. And it sucked.

As far as I can tell, Roman washing machines are miniature plastic death traps covered in numerous buttons and knobs that trip the circuit breaker every five minutes. The machine itself, conveniently located in the bathroom for some reason, is just as big as a washing machine back home, with an interior one fifth the size that resembles a shiny metal cheese grater.

This, of course, made me nervous with my clothes. My roommates had already tried using it the day before I did with frightening results. This is what I woke up to that day:

“Oh my god! My underwear is blue! My underwear and EVERYTHING is blue!!!”

By the time I had stopped laughing and went to investigate, I had come to this conclusion: yes, everything was, indeed, blue, and no, I was not going to touch the questionable detergent they bought in the local marcado.

After a trip to the supermarket and a careful reading of the poorly written instructions left by our landlady, and I felt confident enough to try out the machine for myself. I carefully picked out items I would not miss, just in case they magically changed during the wash, slid out the drawer on the machine, and was promptly confuzzled all over again.

You see, all washing machines here have a drawer on the front of the machine that you slide out to pour in all the stuff you’re going to wash your clothes with, four sections in all. Each area is marked by a simplistic symbol, like a flower for instance. However, the instructions had not bothered to mention what each symbol stood for. Google answered that question for me, though I still have no idea what the square on the far left is used for.

The number one thing I hate spending my time doing is shopping for clothes. Specifically the type of clothes shopping when you have specific things you need to buy. I also was never planning on shopping for clothes while in Rome and spending more money then I needed to. For these reasons I was absolutely dreading the outcome of my laundry day.

Two agonizing hours later I rushed to the washing machine and opened the door. After a flood of water poured out (this, unfortunately, is normal for our beloved machine) I inspected the clothes and let out a sigh of relief, my clothes were fine. The next hour was spent kicking the “out of order” dryer, wringing out my drenched towels and shirts, cursing the torrents of rain that made the clothes line obsolete, and carefully hanging things I needed on the bathroom heater.

All said and done, it took three days for everything to be washed, dried, and put away. It probably won’t take as long now that the rain isn’t as strong anymore and I’ve figured out how best to utilize the heaters, but I’m still not looking forward to tomorrow, when I have to do laundry all over again.