Laundry

Washing clothes seems to be a fairly straightforward concept. You toss in some detergent, put the clothes in the washer, choose hot, warm or cold water and then press start. And your clothes are done in 30-45 minutes at which point you can choose to machine or line dry them. Piece of cake.

Except in France, it's not. Well, not for me anyway. The French tend to wash everything in hot water. They even have ads on TV about laundry detergents that will get your clothes clean, even if you wash them in COLD water! As someone who washes only whites in hot water and nearly everything else in warm or cold, I have come to hate French washing machines. They're slow, needlessly complicated with their settings (pre-wash, wash, long cycle, short cycle, extra rinse, active soak, intensive wash, cotton, synthetique, delicates, wool, 95, 60, 50, 40, or 30 degrees, and * (whatever that means). Okay, okay, I realize that American machines also have the fabric settings, but the last American washing machine I used did not even have those. And I liked it that way.
It may look like an innocent washer, but it's evil I tell you. Pure evil.
Damn, the settings are still too small to read. Too bad. At least you can see all the buttons on the left. Overwhelming for me.

The first time I washed a sweater in a French washing machine, I chose the coldest setting I could find on that particular machine. Thirty degrees. Celsius. I did not do the math in my head to figure out what 30 degrees was in Fahrenheit. "It's the lowest temperature written on the machine, so it must be pretty cool" was the only thought that went through my head. My washing-machine-safe wool sweater would be fine. I should have known better. If I had even just estimated, I would have known that 30 degrees Celsius or 86 degrees Fahrenheit spells disaster for a wool sweater, even a machine-safe one. A second wool sweater met a similar fate this year when it accidently got mixed in with some dark colors, colors that I normally would have washed in cold water in the U.S.

Sweaters have not been the only victims of the washers. This past week, I went to do some bedclothes that had been piling up. I usually wash these on hot, but thinking of my sweaters, I chose a conservative 60 degrees (140 F). The duvet covers came out fine. The fitted cotton sheet did not. It's supposed to fit on a queen sized bed; when it came out, it looked like it would fit on a double bed. I later managed to yank it down over the corners of the mattress which then bowed terribly in the middle. No matter! I got it onto the bed which means that I won! Hahahahahaha! It's on there now, probably digging holes into the side of the mattress as I type...Damn French machines.

I'm sure at some point I'll come to appreciate all the different temperature settings and the options for extra-slow washes, but at the moment, I just want the simplicity of Hot, Warm, Cold, Start.