Hallway Floods and Reallllly Soft Clothes

The laundry situation has been an entertaining one to say the least. Each floor of the dorms (three floors total) has two stackable washer/dryer units. The dryers aren’t like US dryers in the fact that in addition to having to empty out the lint trap there is also a compartment that collects the water that is sucked out of your clothes to make them dry—so you have to empty that before beginning a load or your clothes will just spin and spin with nowhere for the water to go. A little background info is needed before I can continue: I live at the very southern wing end of the second floor hall, and instead of having a room next to me I have the washer/dryer units. They are located in what probably used to be bathroom stalls, because there are four doors in the hall that are precisely the size of small school bathrooms and there are two random sinks with mirrors above them outside these four doors. The two washer/dryer units are each located in one of these little closets, and two of the closets are empty. The first time I did laundry and had to empty the water unit I started dumping the water into one of the random hallway sinks, and much to my surprise water started gushing out the bottom of the sink. I quickly realized that there were no pipes connecting the sinks to anything, so the water was just coming out of the drain and dumping onto the hallway floor! Now, these water units can hold A LOT of water and I used my momentum to dump all the water out at once, so it was quite the flood in the hallway. I now empty the water units in my kitchen sink.

My second adventure in laundry came this afternoon when I was at the grocery store. I was strolling though the cleaning supply aisle, when I noticed my “detergent” was in the fabric softener section (I had bought it my first day here at a little convenience store). I obviously can’t read Dutch, but based on this observation, I realize I have been “washing” my clothes for the past month in fabric softener only. I thought they felt extra soft…