Washing Clothes

Most bathrooms in Norway are huge and they all have heated floors.  In our little 725 square foot condo, our bathroom is larger than my son’s bedroom.  That’s the case, even in some houses.  The reason for their massive size is because the majority of bathrooms also double as the laundry room. 

Washing machines in the bathroom are as common as the toilet, sink and shower.  Dryers are rare, however, because electricity is so expensive, no one uses them.  The bathrooms have to be big because their needs to be enough space to hang up all the clothes on an inside clothes line and still have a clear path to the toilet.  I often find it tedious to hang up each individual sock or pair of underwear, and our bathroom is so huge, I just lay all the wet clothes down on the heated floor and they are dry in no time.  Weird system, but it works.  The warm floors are a real treat.  I’ve found my son lying prostrate on them more than once when he comes in from the cold.

Some lucky people do own clothes dryers, but the dryers are much different than the ones we have in America.  The Norwegian clothes dryers are more like water extractors.  There are no external dryer vents so there isn’t much heat involved in the drying process.  Somehow the dryer sucks out the remaining water in the clothes into this long plastic tube inside the machine.  It’s often necessary to empty the container once or twice before the clothes are dry.  Drying a load of clothes in this type of dryer takes about four hours.  Washing the clothes in a Norwegian front loader takes at least two.  I’ve yet to figure out why this is so, but when Norwegians come to visit us and their clothes are washed in thirty minutes they are certain they couldn’t have gotten very clean in that amount of time.

One day in my Norwegian class we learned about all the names for colors.  One woman was wearing a pretty pink top and when The Good Teacher Inga called it “rosa” (pink) the woman wearing the top said, “It used to be red” (rød).  I later asked her if it turned pink since she’s been in Norway and when she nodded we both had a good laugh.  Norwegian washing machines are notorious for ruining clothes.  They are sophisticated enough that one can select how many revolutions per second the machine spins the clothes (all washers are front loaders), but they have no cold water setting.  The lowest water temperature possible is 90 degrees.  The temperature settings go up by ten degree increments all the way to boiling.  The colors in the clothes fade quickly.

 My classmates “red” shirt was still a pretty shade of pink anyway - at least until she washed it again.