Washers and Dryers Only the Pharaohs Could Love

Being a “cabaña boy” is not all piña coladas, tanning beds, and hot oil massages. Sure, that's what everyone sees, but there's a lot more to it than that. Like doing the laundry. One small wrinkle: the clothes washers and dryers here in Europe, for convenience to the manufactures, do not have any words on them. They are all hieroglyphic-like symbols, that, in fact, do not always mean what I would guess them to mean. This leads to a lot of confusion, especially among American expats, and because I have expressed my bewilderment aloud, I have gotten emails from other expats asking me to tell them how to operate their washing machines, as if my bewilderment had gone away...

You might ask, “why not read the manual?” I have. Besides being utterly confusing with eight, interspersed languages in the same manual, not written by a native English speaker, and named but unexplained buttons, the settings are completely different from washing machines in the United States. Yet the machine has the same inputs: water, electricity, soap, clothes. Where's permanent press? Where's cotton /sturdy?

Take, for instance, the “wrinkle guard” setting on the washer. On my Candy 1225T, that apparently means: at the end of the cycle, after four hours, the wash will remain soaking in water, and you won't be able to open the front loading door. The only way I could figure out how to remedy this was to remove the power, turn off the “wrinkle guard” and set the wash for a different, new, wash cycle. I can appreciate European washers being more “gentle” on clothes, but after four hours, I expect a complete cycle.

The dryer is interesting. Ours does not have a vent to the outside. It has a built-in condenser that stores the evaporated/condensed water in a small tank. The tank needs to be emptied just about every time you dry a load. If you forget to empty that, forget your clothes ever drying. I usually set the dryer on the icon with “3 suns.” This gets my clothes to the partially damp state. Then I set it for another 15-30 minutes on the timed setting or I place them on the heated towel warmers. You may not run the washer and the dryer at the same time. There is an electrical switch that has three positions: “washer”, “dryer”, “off.” This has the side-affect of wearing clothes much past their "sell by" date.

Every time, I wash the clothes, I reminded of trying to order from a Chinese restaurant in the Hague. Choose from numbers one through one hundred, and if you don't like the result, try something different next time.