Laundry day

We are fortunate to have a washer and dryer in our apartment.  In many episodes of House Hunters International the prospective tenants are horrified to find them in the kitchen, which I don't think is a big deal, but ours happens to be in the bathroom, a front-loader with a dryer on top.

 The instructions on the back of the detergent.

Yesterday I made another trip to the grocery store, this time to buy more serious things like laundry detergent.  This is one of those times I'm relieved to have only a few choices of products in a particular category because I couldn't make out a single word on the packaging.  I went with the overall look and price, so hopefully it works okay.  I don't think top-loader machines are as common in Sweden (they use a lot more water and Swedes are environmentally conscious) so I didn't worry about finding a "high efficiency" detergent.

In the kitchen I found a 50ml measuring cup, and after measuring out detergent I poured it into the cap, which is unmarked but turns out to be about that volume. There are three sections of the detergent dispenser drawer, so I put detergent in the big one, hoping it's like the one we had in Virginia.  The fabric softener calls for a half-cap for a 4-6kg load, so I put that in the medium size section of the dispenser drawer.  I think the small one is for bleach.

Now for the controls.  Someday I'm guessing there will be an app where you can scan a word and it will plug it into Google Translate for you (million-dollar idea!), but I don't have that app or a Swedish-English dictionary (it's still in the mail).  And in the time it takes to run to my computer and type in a Swedish word is about the amount of time it takes my jet-lagged brain to forget the word.  So I went with the only word I recognized ("normal"), which is where the dial already was.

It's nice that it gives you a little key to explain the buttons, but I'll have to look up these words as well.  And the water temp was in Celsius so I'll have to do a little cheat sheet.  I'm used to general terms like hot, warm, and cold, so I'm not even sure what temperature a warm water wash should be.  Sigh.

Don't get me started on all the kinds of cheese at even the small grocery store, none of which sounds familiar except for gouda.