March 23 - Laundry day at Heinke's

My mother told me there would be days like this. Now, she didn’t say, “Make sure to do the laundry at Heinke and Gustl’s place when you’re in Germany!”—she never met them, I’m afraid. No, what she said every other week of so was, “Son, help me carry the clothes to the Laundromat!” Carrying wash to a washer is, in fact, usually a lot easier than carrying a washer to the wash, so we scheduled this as a wash day at Heinke and Gustl’s place where we had free use of their washer. In all our bouncing around in Germany so far I had seen only one public laundry and I had no idea where one was out in Reinbek, so it was a relief to be able to use their washer for our clothes. One advantage we had over when I was a kid is that we could use the two backpacks we had brought with from the U.S. to pack our clothes for the ride over on the S-Bahn. I can clearly recall how tired my arms used to get while carrying bags of clothes to and from the Laundromat back in Aurora. If I had possessed a little more initiative and the very modest sewing skills I have now, I could have sewn some kind of a backpack but I never even thought about it back then. As the old Scandinavian saying goes, “Too soon old, too late smart!” (In German: “Zu bald Alt, zu spaet Klug!”)

The surprising news of the morning was that some European Union (EU) court had fined Microsoft in the neighborhood of 500 million Euros for abusing their monopolistic power. In the U.S., by contrast, Microsoft seems to have wriggled out of the huge fines that were initially imposed on it for monopolistic practices and there has been no follow on prosecutions. I heard that one of the Eastern European countries (Hungary, I think) was officially supporting the development of Linux to avoid Microsoft’s monopoly. Anyway, we shouldered our packs and walked down to the Reinbek station after breakfast to take the usual chain of trains to Barmbek where we hopped on the “7” bus to get to Heinke and Gustl’s place.

On the bus I had an almost surreal experience—I spent much of my time in Germany wishing I had more fluency in German, but this was the only time I ever in my life, I think, have honestly wished I didn’t understand English! It started when an odd couple sat down in the seats directly facing us and started conversing in broken English. The man appeared to be a German in his 60s and the women appeared to be a Filipino in her 40s or 50s, and I inferred that English was the only language they had in common. But goodness what they talked about! I really did my best not to hear, but they were seated right across from us and speaking directly at us, so it was almost impossible to ignore. She talked about her friends who had overstayed their visas and were worried about getting caught and deported, and about her efforts to get the equivalent of a green card to stay in Germany and wishing she had a legal job instead of working on the black market. But when he mentioned she could have had children and that would have helped, she retorted that he was the one who had said he was to old to have children and forced her to have the operation! But then she cuddled up with him and said, “Now I have my 68 year old baby.” Help! I wondered if I should start speaking English so that they would stop spilling their guts all over us, but Monika did speak some English and they didn’t even pause in their revelations. I must admit it I wondered if it was one of those mail-order Filipino bride deals that I have rumors about but have never met personally. Be that as it may, I was awfully glad to get off the bus at Heinke and Gustl’s place and put that conversation behind me.

We certainly could not have found a more “Gemuetlich” (comfortable) place to do our laundry than their place. We had wonderful conversation, washed two loads of laundry, were fed a great lunch (pork chop with baked potatoes and cauliflower), and in the afternoon had a chauffeured ride home! The German machine of Heinkes’s offered far more adjustments than I was used to in the U.S. First, water temperature was adjustable in exact degrees from cold up to 90 degrees Centigrade, which is almost boiling. The choice of cycles in some cases limited this, for example, you couldn’t use the boiling water for silks. But I was really fascinated by the spin cycle that could be set for exact spinning speeds from 300 to 1200 rpm. To me, at least, 1200 rpm is really ripping along and in fact I think that explained why our clothes were coming out merely damp at the end of the cycle rather than wringing wet. That was a good thing because the only room we can string the clotheslines to dry the clothes back in Reinbek was cool and had no air circulation, and thus the final drying was a very gradual, if not glacial, process.