Household mysteries - like trash, laundry, & baking!

Hej,
I thought that I would share the idiosyncracies of being an english Canuck dealing with household activities in Sweden - sometimes it is a challenge of being lost in translation even for the basic daily living stuff!
Having been here for almost 2 weeks the garbage and recycling and laundry were all piling up.  Easy enough to take out the garbage right - well not if you can't figure out where the heck it is supposed to go ;)  I wandered into the Miljhus - 'environment house' and there were pictures for a lot of the recyling containers that seemed intuitive enough (glass, cardboard) - but the problem was I couldn't figure out where to put my non-recyclables aka garbage ("sopor").  My solution was to take a picture and bring it in to work and show Kelley (my wonderful labmate & Michael's wife who speaks AMAZING swedish - I'm so in awe!) and she translated that this is where I put my household waste - phew - now I know where the stinky stuff goes :)  And on a side-note - they have this composting system set up where you put all your organic waste - meat included - into special bags and this waste is then burned and used to heat the water that is used in many parts of the city as part of the heating system - apparently quite innovative - seems pretty cool (or is that hot?) to me ;)

Household waste - who knew - not me!

The Waste Hub - "Environment House"

 So with the trash taken out it was time to do laundry.... which seems straightforward and all - but Sweden has it's own unique way of doing the washing - laundry rooms rather than laundromats (although a lot of people do have their own laundry within apts too - but I am not so lucky).  Laundry rooms function very much like a laundromat - only the good news is that you don't need to pay with coins - there is no additional cost to use the facilities - the catch is that you have to reserve them - so you get this little lock and then you place it on the monthly calendar in a 2-hour slot....

The laundry calendar sign-up system

I'm signed up for the 8th of the month from 6-8 pm - luckily it seems not so hard to get a slot :)



What surprises me with our laundry room is that we actually have 3 laundry rooms - each with 3 different types of washing machine - so in essence 9 machines to do our laundry with - but only two dryers and a drying room (the idea of having a big room heated to 100 C or whatever it was also seems like a popular alternative to a dryer machine here).  It seems unlikely that a student would have 9?! loads of laundry to do simultaneously - even when I moved back home I don't think I did that many loads of laundry in a row ;)


3 styles of machines - I stayed away from the middle one!

It turns out I did have enough for 3 loads - so I succeeded in washing clothes - of course there were other challenges - these machines are not simple 'add the soap and hit the start button' operations - they seem to have about 6 different settings for washing (I recognized 'jeans' on one machine) and multiple slots for soap - so I just looked to see which soap holder seemed to have the most mess around it and put mine in there!  In addition to google translate perhaps a swedish-english dictionary would also have been a good choice to bring with me - but now that I have photos perhaps I will sort out the mysteries - or just try to replicate what I did last time!


clear as mud washing directions - even the pictures didn't help me!

So with clean clothes and a garbage-free kitchen I moved on to baking some halloween-themed witch finger shortbread cookies.  The oven it turns out is very intuitive to use - numbers are universal :)  The only catch was that I was on the hunt for a cookie sheet  and could not find one - finally after talking with Etsuko I realized the reason that they sell muffin & cake pans et al. but no cookie sheets is that these are a part of your oven - rather than the grill trays we have back home, the ovens are outfitted with both grill and solid/cookie-broiling trays.  Kind of a duh moment - considering I'd been using the oven and saw the trays but didn't really put 2+2=4 together ;)  So I made a shopping list and google translated some of the items before heading to the store. Vanilj=vanilla which is in powder form rather than extract so was a bit of a guess in terms of how much to add, Mandelbrotten=almonds, and so on - and I bought some baking paper for my cookie trays (bakplåtspapper - Swedish seems to be very intuitive - e.g., sujkhus = "sick house"=hospital - now if only I could figure out pronunciations!!).  I plan to make more cookies soon - although I didn't seem to notice any chocolate chips so maybe that is something they don't have here so much?  Stay tuned :)

Witch finger shortbread cookies ready for the oven (looked better before they were cooked but tasted better after)