Laundry – Not so easy if you don’t speak Danish!

Today we had planned to do laundry. We are staying in the apartment of a couple around our age, and they were nice enough to leave us their laundry card so we could use the machines in the building here. Sounds mundane and straightforward, but it turned out to be a little more complicated than expected.

First, you have to sign up ahead of time for a time slot, similar to the laundry board at ZP actually. We signed up for 10am-1pm today, and then slept till 11:45. Oops.

We got down there and found another woman doing laundry. Apparently, there’s a rule that if you don’t start within 30 minutes of the time slot, then someone else can use the machines. Sensible enough, but we didn’t know!

It actually worked out well, since she had the next time slot from 1-4pm and now she was almost done, so we could use her time. But here’s where it gets really tricky. The laundry machine here has WAY more buttons than at home, and the sign on the wall that explains the buttons was only in Danish. Furthermore, you have to put your card into a reader and then push some additional buttons in order to pay for the laundry machines.

Needless to say, we failed miserably at all of these steps. The woman who had taken our time slot was nice enough to help out, but I imagine that she now thinks that Americans don’t know how to do laundry. We decided to hang our stuff to air dry so that we don’t have to wait around for the dryer – and so we don’t have to figure out another machine!

Now we are off to walk around the south part of the city. We will see the canals, visit the “Free State of Christiania” (we’ll explain more after we see it!) and hopefully eat a meal at one of the restaurants that someone got us as a wedding gift.

We will write and post pictures about it soon!