Yes, who indeed, would have thought that doing laundry could be quite to difficult? Let's start at the beginning:
Last week on my trip to ICA Maxi with Ron I purposely bought washing detergent in liquid form because I knew I wouldn't have a chance to get to the machines to do it any time soon and wanted to do it in my bathroom sink. As I was doing said sink-washing it did sort of cross my mind that there didn't seem to be many bubbles from the detergent, but I carried on anyway. After washing them though, I had a sort of..gut feeling..shall we say, that I may perhaps have done my laundry with fabric softener. Well, this was confirmed last night by one of the Swedish boys in my corridor, though to be fair to myself, my clothes were indeed very soft and seemed clean enough. Ahem.

On Thursday night, Meredith and I decided that our need to do laundry was getting urgent (she has a bad sense of smell and knows that when something starts to smell funky, it must REALLY be funky) and made a date to meet up, cook some eggs, and then go down to the laundry in number 3. The only problem for me though, was that I didn't have any laundry powder, only fabric softener. Never mind, Meredith had bought some and I could use hers.

PROBLEM: we had schlepped everything down there and put it in the machines (after waiting 10 minutes for a free one), but just as I went to pour the powder in, I noticed that in the ingredients were bleaching agents. Yes, apparently, in Sweden there is separate powder for whites and colours. And so, dejected, we turned around and headed back to the house.

MORAL: vitt vätt= white wash, kulor vätt= colours.

I'd already been in a pretty shitty mood because of the seven hundred dollars* that just didn't quite make it in my wire transfer and our inability to do something as simple as laundry really finished off the day for me.

*Oh yes, that seven hundred dollars. It symbolises so many things: 40 hours working my ass off in a dead-end retail job that I could've just pissed away; seven hundred dollars that is now gone, never to be seen again, never to be recouped; seven hundred dollars that could have bought many pretty shoes and clothes; seven hundred dollars for which I got nothing in return except sadness and slight desperation, which has now made way for dejection.

So what did I do last night? I went out and I drowned my sorrows for the lost seven hundred dollars using money I didn't have to spend and won't ever get back, sang Australian songs (scared many Swedes), stuck flags on people's faces, got drunk on pear cider, and somehow managed to walk the three and a half kilometres home on the slippery icy road without falling on my ass.

And it felt great.

PS. Catching the train to Stockholm tomorrow morning to wander and hopefully find something to wear to the international gasque in February. It should be fun, and so like...picturesque..and stuff.