Laundry

By request, a post about laundry.

I will not claim to be a laundry expert. I have never needed to learn the intricacies of the delicate cycle, or running the water twice, or the pre-wash soak.  I don’t wear the sorts of clothes that require anything beyond ‘go’.  Perhaps I have missed out, or perhaps it is a good thing, because if I was picky about how my clothes were washed in Turkey, I might have to go naked, and nobody wants that. 

They are English letters, but it is Greek to me.

We are very fortunate to have a laundry room at the bottom of our building, available to residents 24-7 free of charge.  The only catch is, to use the machines, you need to be initiated.  It is not just that the dials are labeled in Turkish.  A dictionary helps with that.  It is that some of the dials are labeled in machine language, washing machine language. 

This is the dial on the ‘bad’ washer.  The letters are not defined anywhere, they aren’t even in order!  I avoid this washer, thinking if I turn it to the wrong setting I may open up a worm hole in the space time continuum. 

These are the dials on the ‘good’ washers, of which there are three.  There are some nice numbers and you might think they follow a pattern, but no.  Pamuklu is cotton, and soguk is cold, aktif sounds active and mini sounds small.  It turns out that Aktif is a four hour cycle, or so I have heard, I got the tutorial before I discovered that on my own.  Felicia says, “Only ever do mini.  Mini is all you need.”  And it was true; I had never needed anything else before last night.  You see, I had ignored the dial on the right.  I could not have guessed that my laundry downfall would be determined by the position of the other knob…

"All you need is mini."  was my mantra, not realizing the importance of the right dial...

As a general rule, I don’t use a dryer for my clothes.  Part of this is environmental, part is being a cheapskate, and part is that I hate shopping and don’t want my clothes to either shrink or wear out any faster than they have to, because I don’t want to have to replace them.  So when I was doing laundry last night, I was no help at all to the Australian visitors who were trying to figure out the dryer. 

How dry do you want your clothes?  Extra dry? Cabinet dry? Ironing dry? or Canada Dry?

They left and returned with a teacher who speaks enough Turkish to translate the settings.  The arc on the left is a time dry, with dk standing for minutes.  Sentetik makes sence if you say it out loud, is synthetics, and we have met pamuklu before: cotton.  For a language that was theoretically ‘purified’ in the 1920s by Ataturk, it is amazing how many sound alike words have crept in (not that there are enough to be helpful, but it is fun to find them.)  Ekstra kuru is extra dry, Dolap Kurulugu is dry enough to put away, where Utu Kurulugu is dry enough for ironing, which is to say, not completely dry.  Narin is delicate and Havalandirma is air conditioning or ventilation, which as best as we could guess was all air and no heat.   Their problems solved, the Turkish speaking teacher went on to the ‘go’ button, similar to the one in this picture from my washer.  She said, to start, push the Basla button for 3 seconds.  This made sense to me, there was a hand, it was pointing to the button, and under it, it said 3sn. 

A case of too much information is a bad thing.

When I had loaded my laundry in to two machines, I set it to Mini as I was told, and I pushed Baska button for 3 seconds.  Nothing happened.  But this has always worked before.  Try again, counting slower.  Nothing. Eventually, I figure the only thing I have changed was the 3 seconds.  Before I knew about the three seconds, I was a laundry genius.  So I tried it again, just pushing it and releasing.  The magical whir of motors and the comforting addition of water indicated that I had started the cycle.  Now I come to find that iptal means cancel; I was canceling my wash before it even started. 

Anyway, it was going now, so all was back on track.  I go up stairs, I goof off for a while and more than an hour later I get an email from Janelle telling me the ‘good’ dryer was available.  Oh, yeah, I was doing laundry.  Down stairs I go to find that one of my machines produced clean but damp clothes and the other had produced clean sopping wet clothes.  Ack!  As stated above, I don’t know how to do anything fancy with a washing machine in the US, where the dials are in English, there is no way I can figure out what to do here.  So I start wringing out my clothes in the sink and prepare to hang them up in my apartment wet.  Enter the Australian.  He suggest putting them back in on spin for a while.  Great idea, but I have no idea how to do that.  Sikma means spin, he says.  How do you know that?  I ask.  ‘I spent a long time in here looking at the diagrams and comparing them to the machines.’  Sure enough, there was a note on the wall where the second dial on the washer was labeled spin speed and there was the word again at the bottom of the setting dial.  Looking back at my soggy washer, spin speed was set to yok, or not.  Ok, lesson learned, soggy clothes go back in, spin speed turned up, and the go button pressed and released.  I brought my appropriately damp clothes up to hang and went back down in a few minutes to get the rest. 

Tonight, I am going to pop in a movie and fold up all of those now dry clothes that have been adorning my apartment for the last 24 hours.

Please let me know if there are specific things you would like to hear about and eventually I will try to write about them.