Catie: Why you should heart your American washer.

Did we tell you this heap of junk finally works?  Because it does and we are so glad.

[caption id="attachment_48" align="aligncenter" width="224" caption="the heap of junk"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_49" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="translated panel"][/caption]

And now, a lesson in washing clothes, the Korean way:

This is the panel (and the problem) that we had to work with. However, with the help of many web searches (eatyourkimchi.com -- that site has been our lifesaver) we were able to translate the important words.

Our friends, Brian and Aaron (they work with Ben) told us what to do with the buttons and it turns out if we just stay completely away from the left side of the panel, it's super easy.

This winged creature...

[caption id="attachment_50" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="the winged creature"][/caption]

....is our drying rack.

That's our veranda, too. You can see the floor to ceiling windows behind the rack that open to circulate air. A lot of people bring their racks up to their roof and dry them there. But since we arrived, the air's gotten a lot dryer, so our clothes have been getting dry a lot faster.

Another funny thing is that the washing machines here don't have the middle piece that agitates...

[caption id="attachment_59" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="no agitator?"][/caption]

...so we have to bag all our clothes in these giant lingerie bags so they won't mash up. The lack of an agitator has been known to tangle my long sleeved shirts into looooong sleeved shirts when bags spontatneously open mid-cycle (they have these little elastic stoppers to keep them from opening, but we're going to have to start safety pinning them because the elastic's either not working, or we don't know how it's supposed to work).

Now we just have to tackle the problem of the tripped electrical breaker.

It keeps popping whenever we have the washer going with anything else plugged in, stopping our wash cycle every 10 minutes so that it keeps starting over and over and washes our clothes to a linty pulp.

I think we've fixed it by making sure everything's unplugged before we wash though. It hasn't done it in a while. And we should be moving soon anyway, to a newer place, so hopefully that won't be such a problem then.

And that's your lesson on The Korean Washing Machine. Probably boring, sorry... I'm just so excited it's working now!

-catie