Daniel Ferrante

I’m amazed at how some things that would be a simple task in the U.S. are incomprehensibly difficult in France. Take doing laundry for instance:

I live in a university dorm room in Dijon. There are nearly 20,000 students that attend the university. There are over 20 dorms here at the University. We share ONE room to do laundry. This laundry room has THREE washers and THREE dryers. Let’s do the math:

Each dorm has 33 people per floor. Each dorm has four floors, that’s 132 students per dorm plus the service staff (who also live in the dorms). So, nearly 140 people per dorm building. 140 people in each of 20 buildings is 2800 people over all, with just three washers and dryers among us.

The washers hold very little clothing. I can easily fit twice as much clothing in a U.S. washing machine than I can fit into one of these small, Lilliputian machines. I swear these things were designed by Handy to accomodate Schtroumpfs.

As if all this isn’t a big enough pain, it costs €2.30 to wash one load of laundry and then €1.60 to dry my clothes completely. Since the washers are so small, I have to do five loads a week. This means I spend nearly €20 a week on laundry or €80 a month! The only thing that costs me more is my rent. And if you wonder what €80 translates to, that’s about $100. I could go to Switzerland for a weekend on €80. I could take my girlfriend out for a nice dinner, a movie and dancing TWICE on €80. It’s insanely expensive. In the U.S., I spent MAYBE $10 a week on washing…

And since there’s only three machines for the entire campus (and they’re only open from 9h00 to 22h30) I have to queue for nearly 2 hours just to get a machine. Then, as it takes me 2 hours to wash and dry one load of laundry, it takes me literally ALL DAY to wash all my clothes.

I’ve been able to cut down on the incovenience by wearing my jeans two or three times before washing them and using special dryer sheets to clean my sweaters. But while this saves me a little money, it still takes over half the day to wash my clothes.

You may think it would be better for me to go to a different laundrymat, but the others are more expensive, costing €5 to wash and €2 to dry.

Oh, and the method of payment is great. There’s no change machine in the laundry room, so I have to to the Post Office to get €20 in change for the machines (yes, the POST OFFICE, I am neither kidding nor lying when I say that the BANKS here don’t actually have money). Then the machines themselves don’t have a slot to pay, there’s one central payment box where you drop in your money and press the number for the dryer or the washer you’re using. No change is given if you don’t have exact change AND if you accidentally over pay on the dryer, you don’t get any extra time credited. You get 26 minutes exactly. No more, no less. Even better, if you open the dryer and the dryer stops, you still run down the timer, whether or not the dryer is actually going.

When I visited Nice, the hostel I stayed at charged us €5 to do ALL our laundry, including folding it!! It costs €40 round trip to get to Nice and €20 a night for the hostel plus €5 for the laundry, and since breakfast is included, hmmm it’s cheaper for me to go to Nice to do my laundry than it is to do it here… and somehow that doesn’t surprise me.

Afterall, in France, peanut butter can only be found in the international aisle at the supermarkets…

However, as I’ve said before, I love it here and I am glad I came here.