Clean Laundry

3:12 PM Adam 2 Comments

Here is a new immigrant story for you.

Picture us just a day or so after we have landed. We have a new home that was generously filled with all sorts of goodies to make it feel like home. Food in the fridge. A pantry full of food. And, a bathroom stocked with cleaning supplies.

What kind of cleaning supplies you ask? (okay, I get it you did not ask that question in your head, because who really thinks about cleaning supplies? But for this story, pretend like you asked me that question)

I am glad you asked.

Here is what we found.




So after a whirlwind adventure, we naturally had a lot of laundry to be done. My brave wife decided to tackle the beast of a new washing machine. In Framingham, there was really only two settings: on and off. I guess you could also choose from cold/warm/hot temperatures, but it was a fairly dummy proof washing machine.

This one ... this one has a lot of settings. And all the temperatures are in Celsius, of course. Piloting an airplane looks less complicated than this thing. Brave Rachel decided to tackle it, and guess what? She succeeded. She successfully figured out how to start the washing machine. Hooray!

Which of these fine cleaning products did we decide to use for our first attempt at laundering our clothes? Why this one, of course.

Beautifully scented laundry detergent

For those of you who speak Hebrew, hold your laughter please.

It seemed to make the most sense. It looked like liquid laundry detergent. We narrowed down the others. One was fabric softener, another was for baby clothes, toilet bowl cleaner was obvious, as was the dish soap. Clearly, we were right. In the States, we had several kinds of laundry detergents. Usually, for the mixed laundry of all of our clothes, we reached for the liquid stuff, and not the powdered baby detergent.

Well, I must say, that first load seemed like a huge success! The clothes came out clean. They smelled wonderful. Now all we needed to do was hang them on the drying rack that was provided for us and put them out in the Sun to dry. Not so bad. Hard task made easy. We got the hang of this. Right?

A few days go by and a neighbor is over. I'll spare you some of the details and let you in on the secret.

That green bottle? Not laundry detergent. Its floor cleaner.

Oops.