Dirty laundry

All right, I give. You got me.

It's true, I was warned. I was warned that things would be different. That the secrets of the East were many and profound. And I have kept an open mind and sought, if not to understand, then at least to accept and adapt to the new world around me. But this. This, man.

Seriously. For the love of god. Where is the friggin' lint trap?

Two weeks, and I found something that bugs the hell out of me. To be sure, there are a few things, minor things. There are no trash cans on the street, so if you decide to have a Coke outside, you gotta hang onto it all the way home. The public bathrooms are, shall we say, more public than I would like. There's that whole plug adapter thing. But I've got a year of struggle and hardship ahead of me with my washer/dryer.

The good news is that I have a washer/dryer in my apartment. It's kind of weird, because it's a single unit: you wash your clothes in it and then push a button, and dry them in it too. But hey, whatever, right? So the good news is that I have something more than a tub, a board, and some lye. The bad news is...everything else.

First of all, the thing holds three kilos. I'm still struggling with the metric conversion, but I think 3 kg works out to something like five and a half socks. Seriously, this thing is small. So I'm faced with washing my clothes every other day, or a fourteen-hour laundry marathon. That's the other thing. It takes literally (really actually literally) three hours to do a load of clothes, because it takes an absurdly long time to do anything. "Standard" washing time is over an hour. "Standard" drying time is an hour and a half. This, incidentally, does not actually dry your clothes; it just gets them hot and damp, like some tiny fat man went jogging in them for ninety minutes. Real dry, you're looking at two, two and a half hours, and it turns all your shirts into balled up newspaper. During which time, of course, you can't start any more laundry because there's only one damn machine.

And -- of course -- all the controls are in Korean. Natch.

Yeah, that was fun. I washed my sheets three times trying to get them dry before I caved and spent the next two hours translating all the controls on my console. Well, "translating." I figured out that the fourth cycle is the "agitate" cycle (or, literally, the "anger" cycle, as in you anger your clothes, which I like). But what are the spin-dry settings: "river," "standard," and "medicine"? And I understand the setting for "synthetics" but not the one below it for "noisy."

It's a good thing everything I own is cotton. And my place comes with an iron, which is probably the best way to get things actually dry -- and pressed, for that matter.

So I figured, this is how I spend my weekends. Two shirts at a time for six hours a load. Whatever. And then yesterday I spend two hours with a load in the dryer, and it comes out piping hot and soaking wet. So I throw it in for another hour. Nothing. So it occurs to me that I might need to clean the lint trap. Only I can't find the lint trap. There's a "drainage atmosphere" setting for "filter cleaner," but I can't get it to respond. There's a sort of a panel on the front, so it's probably under that. But I can't get the panel off, of course. So then I get worried, because aren't dirty lint traps fire hazards or something? I mean, it's one in the morning, and I still have a load of darks, but I need this thing clean, or I'm gonna burn down Korea.

I asked a teacher about it this morning, and he said, "You know, I don't think there is a lint trap. You probably just put too many clothes in."

Oh. Ah.

Well, another bout with that bastard, and I might just burn down Korea anyway.