We have a washer and dryer (about big enough to do a pair of pants and 2 shirts at a time), so we needed to purchase some laundry detergent. Back to the trusty American brands we're familiar with. Again, the bag says Tide on it, but nothing else in English. There are many bags of Tide to choose from. Our driver assures us that Tide is good and a lot of people use it here. He said it's really good for getting shirts white (that's a big deal here). So I'm standing in front of my washer with my new bag of Tide and not knowing how much to use as I'm looking at the bag looking at the picture of the 2 and 4 spoons but not knowing what size spoon and if we're talking about different size loads, different size washing machines or what, and that's only part of my problem. It strikes me that the different bags of Tide are a little different colors and if memory serves me correctly the packaging for Tide with bleach and the regular Tide are in different color coded packages. Then the words of my driver run through my head. "It's especially good for getting shirts white." Hmmm. Am I about to wash my black jeans with Tide with BLEACH? So I decided to do the socks, underwear and white towel load, and wait until our driver dropped us off the next time and have him come in and read the package to us. Of course, he's a 26 year old guy, so he could kind of read what some of the package said, but was a little sketchy on understanding what I was asking. Just to be on the safe side, I picked up the Tide in the other packaging before washing our darker things. The pictures on that package at least showed some bright colored clothes. So far I haven't filled the room with soap suds using our little front loading washing machine, making our apartment look like a scene from an I Love Lucy episode and all our clothes seem to be coming out o.k.
After the clothes are clean it's time to dry them. Chinese people don't use clothes dryers, but we were allowed to have one if we wanted one. I decided that as fun as it would be to try hanging
out the clothes and really get into the spirit of the culture here, there would also be times when it would be nice to have clothes dry in less than 2 or 3 days (it's very humid here). Although the drying rack on our back laundry area is really cool. There are 2 long rods on a pulley system. You crank it down, hang your clothes, then crank it back up. It's really pretty cool, and we've been having fun playing with it. But sometimes we like to use our new dryer. You would think a dryer would be simple enough to use. There's only 3 buttons. How hard can it be? Of course, they're in.... Chinese. And the numbers are metric. I can make it work, but don't know what settings I have it on. Again, between being a guy and not being familiar with this American clothing drying machine our driver was not much help trying to translate the buttons. So it's fine drying some things, but I don't want to dry other things on hot and wind up with pants the size of a kindergartener. So I have a new Chinese girlfriend who's going to stop by my apartment on our way to a shopping outing that we're going on that's going to help me figure out how to work my clothes dryer. Ahhh, the things we take for granted at "home".
After the clothes are clean it's time to dry them. Chinese people don't use clothes dryers, but we were allowed to have one if we wanted one. I decided that as fun as it would be to try hanging
out the clothes and really get into the spirit of the culture here, there would also be times when it would be nice to have clothes dry in less than 2 or 3 days (it's very humid here). Although the drying rack on our back laundry area is really cool. There are 2 long rods on a pulley system. You crank it down, hang your clothes, then crank it back up. It's really pretty cool, and we've been having fun playing with it. But sometimes we like to use our new dryer. You would think a dryer would be simple enough to use. There's only 3 buttons. How hard can it be? Of course, they're in.... Chinese. And the numbers are metric. I can make it work, but don't know what settings I have it on. Again, between being a guy and not being familiar with this American clothing drying machine our driver was not much help trying to translate the buttons. So it's fine drying some things, but I don't want to dry other things on hot and wind up with pants the size of a kindergartener. So I have a new Chinese girlfriend who's going to stop by my apartment on our way to a shopping outing that we're going on that's going to help me figure out how to work my clothes dryer. Ahhh, the things we take for granted at "home".
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