laundry, part 1

Just around the corner from our apartment in Porto in 2022…

Pro tip: If you don't speak the language of the country you're visiting, don't just wing it with the washer.

Because, unlike espresso machines, messing up your laundry is a big deal, especially if you packed really light.

When we were in Porto in 2022, we had a washer in our flat, and of course, we used it. Unfortunately, all functions were labeled with symbols that made no sense to us, so it wasn't like we could use a translation app* to figure things out.

(*Side note: If you’re going to be in Portugal, don’t use Google Translate, which only offers Brazilian Portuguese. Instead, you want to use DeepL.)

We bulldozed ahead without really knowing what buttons we were pushing on the washer. That wasn't the worst idea we've had but it sure wasn't the best either.

It turns out that the washer was actually a washer/dryer combo and we accidentally dried a load of dirty laundry with laundry detergent. When the clothes came out hot and smelling strongly of a chemical hybrid of perfume and flowers**, we knew we had made a grievous error.

(* *Since I have sensitive skin and am allergic to scented products, we tried throughout the trip to find unscented detergent. This proved to be a quixotic quest and ultimately we bought detergent for babies, which was slightly less scented.)

My husband went online and found the owner's manual for the washer/dryer and painstakingly translated it bit by bit. He eventually figured out how to run the washer and we put the load in without any detergent and washed it. Unfortunately, the detergent scent was baked in, so we ended up washing the load a second time and just lived with the aura of perfume until it faded away.

For the rest of the trip, each time we moved to a new Airbnb, we downloaded and translated the owner's manuals first and THEN we did laundry.