You may not be old enough to remember the little tune that goes with the title of this blog, but if you do, you will find extra humor in today's blog.
My blog today is about washing clothes in Germany. I know, it sounds boring. And well ... it is. But it also helps to answer yesterday's question of the day. I asked, "What is a condenser dryer?" Well, that is the kind of dryer that most people have here. Remember when I wrote about being environmentally conscientious here? One way they do this is with their washers and dryers. Can you think of other appliances in your home that use a lot of energy? How can these items be used more efficiently?
The wash water is heated efficiently from within the machine, not using the hot water from the house. It also uses much less water to wash the clothes than our washer did in Summerville. It also takes longer to wash a load and has a much smaller capacity than ours did in Summerville.
The dryer, likewise, is a condenser dryer. Instead of venting the dryer outside, many of the buildings don't have vents built in, so they use a condenser dryer instead. This type of dryer collects the water into a plastic holding tank built into the dryer as the clothes dry. After each load, I have to pull the tank out, dump the water (onto my plants - must not waste, right?) and then re-insert the tank back into the dryer. Although this helps some with the drying, it does not get the clothes all the way dry. So, like everyone else, we had to buy a clothes rack so that we could then hang our warm moist clothes out to dry. Hmmm...
Thus, as you can imagine, doing the laundry has come to be an ever present part of my every day life. For our family of four, I have to do two to three loads a day just to keep up. I will admit that I do really miss doing laundry in America!!
The question for today is "What is/are Conkers?"
The word for the day is Tree: der Baum (pronounced boum where the ou makes the same sound as in noun.) Can you think of a Christmas song that uses Baum as part of the song?
Auf wiedersehen,
Frau Spitzer
