The Washing Machine
When I first tried to use the washing machine it honestly just freaked me out, since I had no idea what it said or how to operate it. In time though, I finally understood how to somewhat work the machine. Now I am a fully operational independent girlfriend at home who is able to work a washing machine.
The only thing I found about using this washing machine is that it seriously takes forever to wash just one load of clothes. It can take up to 2-4 hours just to wash one load of laundry and this is a brand new machine. We typically have to set it on a high turbo setting, which generally gets the most water out of our clothes. This is probably a big reason as to why it takes so long to wash our clothes; on the contrary though, if we didn't set it on these setting we would have clothes hanging in our apartment for days, since dryers do not exist in Brazil.
Where's the Dryer?
Unfortunately, Dryers do not exist in Brazil. Brazilian's claim dryers consume way too much electricity and shrink their clothing. Europe and the U.S. have even discontinued sending dryers to Brazil long ago. You will not even find dryers on the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (also known as IBGE) list. This is the most prestigious institute in Brazil that calculates all data regarding geosciences and social, demographic and economic statistics. They have yet to find one drying machine in a household in Brazil. Brazilians typically just use a clothes line or a drying rack like ours that you see on your left hand side. We have had to get creative at times as you can see by using our broomstick and draping it across my closet doors for clothes to dry. Laundry day in Brazil is most certainly a project in itself. Laundry day was a very hard thing for me to adjust to, because I generally wear a lot of clothing at a time and I will wear one piece of clothing once and want to wash it. I learned very quickly if I did that here we would be doing laundry all of the time and clothes would be drying all over our apartment, so I definitely took it down a notch in terms of wearing clothing only once, then wanting to wash it. We have to plan our days very carefully when we plan on doing laundry, because it is such a huge process. However, we always manage to get it done whether we have a lot of clothes spread throughout our apartment in all of our rooms or we have fewer clothing and it doesn't take up too much room in our apartment. |