The Cleanest Clothes in the Land

Europeans, I’ve found, like their laundry clean. Like so clean you can eat off of it, completely sterilized clean. It’s the only explanation I can find for why they would ever need to wash their clothes in water that’s 90ºC (for those of you unfamiliar with the metric system, that’s 194ºF and very close to boiling). It’s a phenomenon that we were warned about last summer in Berlin, and one I thought only applied to the Germans.

Not so, apparently. The Danes, too, like their clothes absurdly clean. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for the existence of my host family’s washing machine.

From appearances, it doesn’t look particularly different from other European washing machines that I’ve encountered; the coldest setting is 30ºC (86ºF) and the hottest is 90ºC (194ºF). There’s a knob, with a couple of indecipherable numbers (which evidently isn’t particularly important, as it has never moved from it’s current position), and an on/off switch.

No, the unusual thing about my family’s washing machine is the ungodly amount of time it takes to complete a wash cycle— namely, two hours. Back home, I’m completely done with all my laundry within this time (I admit I am aided by the fact that I can use more than one washer at the same time, but still— 1 hour and 38 minutes are all it takes to completely wash and dry a load of laundry). The school washer takes precisely 38 minutes to complete a cycle; the one in my house takes about 45 minutes. So I can’t for the life of me figure out what the one here is doing to my clothes that would require two hours. Added to the fact that the dryer takes upwards of an hour and a half, it means it takes me about six hours to wash and dry one load of darks and one load of lights.

I suppose, at the very least, I can rest easy knowing that— between the machine’s inability to wash anything in less than scalding hot water, and its extremely long wash cycle— should the need ever arise, my clothes are most likely sterile enough to perform surgery in.