I am floating on Cloud 9 right now because today I bought a hair dryer and I also did laundry for the first time, so I'm going to be a completely different person tomorrow walking to class with dry hair and clean clothes!! Neither of these was an easy feat, however.
I never considered myself high maintenance, but my hair dryer from home only works for about 30 seconds at a time here even with a converter, and my straightener only goes up to about 90 degrees and isn't hot enough to actually straighten my hair. I feel disgusting going to school every day with wet hair so I finally broke down and found a hairdryer today for just 11 Euro. Even just walking through the store carrying the box made me extremely happy!
Laundry is another story in itself. I love how I can sit in my dorm room here, 3600 miles from South Hadley, MA, but I can still look up North Rockefeller Hall, where I lived last semester and not only see which washers and dryers are in use, but how many minutes each of them has left. Here, I had to go to an office between 19:00 and 20:00 tonight and buy special tokens for my laundry. One load of wash costs 1,50 Euro and to dry costs 1,80 Euro. The laundry room is thankfully in my dorm, but we share it with 2 other dorms I believe. There are 5 washing machines and ONE dryer. They are all extremely tiny and look like they're from the 70s. They all have a million settings and strange symbols which are completely in German, so I had no idea what was going on and took a guess. I put it on the coolest setting for wash (30 degrees C) and hoped for the best. Everything seemed ok, so I stuck my stuff in the dryer. There were also a whole bunch of settings on it so I chose "shranktrocken +". I have absolutely no idea what that means, and the dryer gave me no indicator of when it would finish. So I left and prayed that everything would be ok for the next hour and a half.
When I went back down to check on it, there was a guy there waiting and he asked me how much longer my dryer had. I told him I had no idea and he asked if I could wait for it to be done so he could dry his clothes. I said I would, but forgot my suitcase(/hamper/laundry transporter) upstairs, so I went to go get it and on the way I tripped and fell right in front of him and basically made a fool of myself and he died laughing. When I came back he said something to me in German and I had no idea what it meant, so I asked him to repeat it and I still had no idea, so I decided to stop my dryer early, since I think he was getting mad that I was still using it. Miraculously, everything was dry and nothing shrunk (I tried stuff on to make 100% sure), so now I have clean clothes that smell good, it just wasn't as graceful a process as I imagined it to be.
The other exciting things of the day are that I registered for a class about women's higher education in Germany which will be amazing, we analyzed one of my favorite movies of all time, Run Lola Run, in my German film class, and we got to play kid's Taboo in my language class! Tomorrow I have my big test in my language class, and it's hard to study and take it seriously when I know I'm not getting any credit for this course at all.
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