In Prague with Sandeep

Big Plans

So as of late I've been spending my time booking reservations. Tomorrow I will fly to Prague. I will be there from Wednesday until next Monday. The original plan was to only be there for two or three days, but it was much cheaper to fly on Monday, so it's actually the same price to return on Friday as it was to return on Monday, so naturally, I chose to stay longer. Then on tuesday, wednesday and thrusday I'm in Paderborn. On friday of next week I am on my way to Oktoberfest then I'm on my way back to Paderborn on Saturday night (just a quick beer festival is all we have time for) then on Sunday I join a group of foreign students on a trip to Berlin for the day of German Unity, and I will not return until Monday. Needless to say, I'll be a bit busy for the next two weeks. I probably won't be able to update until at least two weeks from today. And even then, I'll be so tired that I may not get to it for a few days. Excitement is in the works, I just have to be patient now.

Laundry: The Two-Day-Event

Laundry: The Two-Day-Event

Laundry.  Everyone hates it.  It’s worse here.  The washing machines here take for ever.  It’s an hour to wash and two hours to dry.  That kind of makes laundry an all day event, even if all you have is one load, but wait, it gets better.  Well, on Wednesday, I decided to do laundry.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  I put my laundry in the washer, add soap, close the door (front load washers) and put my laundry card in the little card reader and push the button.  Nothing happens.  “Um, hello? Waschmaschine?”  There is no power to the washing machines, and no power to the card reader.  My card won’t come out.  “Great.”  So I go back to the washer and push the door button to open the door.  Nothing happens.  Apparently the door button is also somehow electrical.  “Fantastic.”  So now my laundry and my laundry card are stuck in the laundry room.  So I go back up to my room and get my phone.  Oh yeah, I’m out of prepaid minutes.  I can’t call the Hausmeister.  So I go to the international office to see if I can use their phone.  No one is there.  So I go to the Eurobiz office.  No one is there. So I go to the Studentwerk (housing) office.  No one is there.  Are we noticing a pattern?  So I just go home, throw a temper tantrum, and wait.  In the morning, I got up early and went downstairs to talk to the Hausmeister.  I told him the washer was broken.  I don’t know how to say that someone must have blown a fuse in German.  He goes down stairs to the laundry room and opens a fuse box (it was locked or I would have done it my self) then the washer turns on and I can take my laundry card.  I thanked him and went to class.  When I got out of class, I put my clothes in the dryer and went to work for a few hours.  When I got home, the dryer with my laundry in it was already open, my clothes were still wet and there was a paper taped to it that said “kaput”.  Well thanks.  That probably would have been a good thing to know before I put my clothes in it and paid to dry them.  So I took my wet clothes and hung them all around my tiny room to dry, a full day after I started to do laundry.