The Rural Side of Things/Evil Laundry Machines

Monday night Ian and I thought it might be nice to go out to dinner. We left around 7:30 and upon arrival in the middle of town, it was practically deserted. Barely a soul was in sight, which we thought was very weird, but we headed for a restaurant that Dr. Buck had recommended. After sitting down in the partially occupied dining room, a waiter came over and informed us that they were no longer serving food. Awesome. So we got up and walked across the square to an Italian restaurant, which was practically deserted as well, but the woman gestured us in and we sat down and each ordered a personal pan pizza. They were all tasty, but Susan ate only half of hers and we weren’t sure if they have take-home containers in Germany, so she just left it there, being too nervous to ask for one. We’re still not entirely sure what that was all about…but now we know that going out to dinner at 7:30 on a Monday is generally not done.
Tuesday was quite nice. Ulrike showed us the rural side of Greifswald, fields, and woods that were quite pretty once the sun came out. The Sun! Who knew it existed in Germany?! It was finally just slightly sunny and fairly warm, with the breeze soft and not harsh as per usual. I took many pictures as we walked around and after we came back into town, we all got a small ice cream cone. It was called “soft-ies” (soft-ice). Ulrike told us that soft-eis is an East-German thing, and it was very good, and only about 90 cents. We stopped by the Institute and I noticed that it had American and Canadian movies for students to borrow, and I was so excited that “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” was on the list, because I love Jimmy Stewart and I haven’t seen that movie! Alas, they could not find the movie, but I did take out “Casablanca”, which I intend to watch on Thursday, because it is Ascension Day, and so there are no classes. Dr. Brauer even offered to let me borrow the first 2 seasons of “Eureka” on DVD, which I agreed to because I’ve caught that show several times and really liked it. She admitted that she watches a lot of Sci-Fi since it’s her favorite. I love that she loves it!
Tuesday night was must more frustrating. We decided that it was finally time to do laundry as I was running low on underwear and Susan had just gone out and bought some more. We went through 2 locked doors to get the hallway where the laundry room was (our room keys worked on those doors). We spent about 5 minutes attempted to open the locked laundry-room door and cursing whoever thought that it was necessary to put 3 locks between us and the laundry room. We finally gave up and started to walk away when another girl came down the hallway, so Susan immediately asked her to show us how to open the door. She pointed out that the door is tricky and you have to sort of pull it towards you while unlocking it and then shove it in. Naturally. So we ran to get our laundry and spent another 5 minutes attempting to use the girl’s technique, which finally worked. The next fifteen minutes or so was spent attempting to figure out how in the world to work the washer machines! I’ve never seen so many buttons on a machine in my life, and all the directions being in German was little help since Susan’s vocabulary doesn’t exactly extend to technical terms. We finally figured it out and paid the 2.10 euros required just for a wash! The digital readout said “20”, so twenty minutes later we returned to a readout that said “27”. What?! There was a man there, so we asked him, and he told us that the wash takes an hour. We’re still not entirely sure why it counted upwards and then back down again…but the man asked us if we lived there. Why would we be doing laundry there if we didn’t? And how would we have gotten through 3 locked doors?? Susan just told him that it was our first week here.
The mystery of the laundry was thus solved, and the only thing is that we will have to do it all over again in about a week, but now I know we CAN figure things out.
Today I attended Introduction to Women’s Studies class with Dr. Brauer, which was very interesting, even if it was a bit hard to understand a few of the students. And we finally made some concrete plans to go into Berlin on Sunday taking the 6:32 a.m. train (!), but I feel like I’m finally getting somewhere!
Gute Nacht.