Life here in Germany is all unicorns and rainbows, unless you are out of milk on a Sunday or doing laundry.

Let’s talk laundry first. After using our washer/dryer combination unit (a single machine that does both – not two separate machines) for several weeks now, I’ve learned three important things. First, the washer/dryers here hold less than half of what US machines do – one load is about 3 sets of clothes – 3 tops, 3 bottoms, 3 socks, 3 unders. Second, the washing & drying cycle takes 4 hours – about twice as long as what it takes in the US – and you can’t have two loads going at the same time, because you have only one unit. And third, the drying portion of washing & drying does not actually dry the clothes, so you end up having to hang dry them anyway!

This is all fine and good – I spend a lot more time doing the laundry than at home, but I don’t mind much and hey, the reason it works like that is to save energy. All for it! But things came to a head this weekend after a series of fortunate and unfortunate events – fortunately, we got to go on vacation to Greece; unfortunately, the week before we left, I threw out my back and lost a filling and spent a heck of a lot of time not doing laundry. I am now completely over my head, literally, in laundry. I am estimating that I have 14 loads to do on top of the 2 per day I usually need to do in order to keep up, and because I am an engineer at heart, I had to work out exactly how long it will be until I am back to steady state, and it turns out that I can expect that to (hopefully) happen on Sunday (today is Monday). Here is a picture so you can enjoy this sorry situation. It really doesn’t do it justice as you can’t see the full load in the machine, or the depth of the laundry hamper, or the second of our two drying racks, but see if you can spot me at least:

So, if you need me, I’ll be in the laundry room, or praying for a bit of sun so I can hang some of Matt’s underwear outside.

Oh – and the milk on Sunday thing – in Germany, it is literally illegal for shops to be open on Sundays. No grocery, no IKEA, no drugstores (the towns rotate emergency Sunday pharmacy duties, the schedule of which is published in the German-language newspaper and nowhere else), and there’s no Target or Walmart to begin with, so basically nothing is available to purchase, anywhere, on a Sunday. No exceptions!

It’s pretty awesome in most cases – you can still do everything else, like be outside, visit a museum or a zoo, be with family and friends, see a movie, eat at a restaurant, etc – and it’s great to cross shopping off the list of things to do on a Sunday. Truly, I had no idea how much I must have shopped on Sundays back at home until I couldn’t do so here! However, and this is a big however, we have to be soooo super-on-top-of-things on Saturday in order to make it through Monday morning, especially since both our fridge and the food package sizes here are so much smaller than what we were used to in the US. We are talking big, important considerations, like do we have enough beer? enough snacks? enough wine? And a bit more seriously, do we have enough milk? do I have something I can make the kids for lunch on Monday? will we still have ‘healthy snacks’ by Monday morning so I can send those in, too? will the veggies and cereal last? And visiting the grocery store on Saturday night is like being Rio for Carnevale – maybe a little more subdued given we’re surrounded by somewhat humorless Germans, but not much. Everyone and their mother is out making sure there will be enough beer for everyone for the weekend, and apparently, people need a lot of beer here, because it’s carried out by the crate:

So again, all fine and good for the most part, except when you have to explain to your children on a Monday morning why we have 15 different beers between the fridge and the basement, but no milk for their cereal! And that’s no exaggeration – Rowan double checked the count in disbelief. I have never been so ashamed…and perhaps, a tiny bit proud.