My Korean Laundry Nightmare

Oh my goodness gracious, you don’t know how hard it is to live in a foreign country until you try to use a washing machine with only foreign writing on it! I just spent about an hour trying to translate the words on my washing/drying machine, pressing buttons and adding detergent/softener before finally giving up and calling my poor boss, Han. He was nice enough to come right over and set me to rights. I think the water hookups were messed up, so he had to fix those as well. Now I am washing my towels (in 2x the regular amount of fabric softener and detergent! haha). They will be EXTRA clean and soft!

I was really worried at LotteMart today, I thought I would have to try out a Korean fabric softener. I tend to have skin reactions to the majority of detergents and softeners that arent Tide Original, Free or April Downy. Thankfully, on my way out of the aisle I came across Downy in April Fresh (it costs twice as much as the Korean softeners, about 6,900 KRW, but I don’t feel like breaking out in the coming months).

Phew. I’m glad I now know which buttons to be pressing and where I should be adding my liquids. Only downside is, I spent the majority of my afternoon wasting time trying to figure it all out, and I still have 3 loads left to do! And because the machine is a washer AND dryer, it takes an hour and 45 min per load. Oy vey…