Day to day - Laundry!

Friday, July 6, 2007
Tired and busy. We came back from Italy on Tuesday night. We spent most of Tuesday travelling. Delays at Milano Centrale railway station (oh Italy! The railway equivalent of the air-traffic control collapsed and trains were just sitting on the tracks while they got themselves sorted). At Milano Centrale there are trains coming in on average every 4-5 minutes! It meant that we missed our scheduled train, and ended up getting into Basel at midnight, and just making the last tram home. Wednesday was laundry day. I have spent the last couple of days paying bills, doing paperwork and researching sourdough. That will be another story when I get to it! So the weekend is rolling around, and I am tired and feeling like I don’t know where the holidays went! Actually they were delightful, but depending upon how this weekend goes I will not be ready to post about it until the mid-end of next week.

Laundry day deserves an explanation. You might wonder “What could be so fascinating about doing ones laundry?”. Well let me enlighten you - if you live in an apartment in a Swiss city it is likely to become very important at some time. In Switzerland private (internal to each dwelling) laundries are generally the exception, unless you pay higher rent for larger and more expensive “family friendly” accommodation – or premium real estate. Coming from Australia and New Zealand this was a bit of a surprise since private laundries are common there, in fact almost ubiquitous. As a consequence Swiss apartment building rules usually include regulations about the use of common laundry facilities.

So … in our building no one has a private laundry. We share a large laundry in the basement, with a top of the line washer and dryer. There is plenty of space to hang stuff on the lines. But because of one having just the one washer and dryer the whole process is a perfectly linear step-dependent event.

This all sounds potentially reasonable. But then you have to factor in the noise rules, which abound in strata by-laws in Switzerland. In our building this means that you cannot wash before 7am or after 10pm at night. No matter that the laundry is in the basement, which resembles a concrete bunker and is just as soundproof. There is also lockable door if you are afraid of your smalls running amok. Of course being Switzerland one is absolutely NOT allowed to do laundry on Sunday either. As Mark would say “Das geht ABSOLUTE nichts!”.

Hmm, so with no Sunday washing, and no washing overnight it could still be OK if there were less than 6 or 7 units in the building. Everyone would have a whole day to arrange their laundry around work, school or whatever. Our building has over 30 apartments ranging in size from bed sits to 2 bedroom apartments. Some units have small families. This all amounts to each unit being allocated 5 hours once each fortnight to do all their laundry.

If it was all in Jason’s hands, our laundry would never get done, as of course he is expected to be at work on Wednesdays! This is actually a case where me being at home is an asset! I have no idea what people who work full time do. We are by no means unique, there are much larger flat buildings around us, and in other parts of the city. Presumably they have industrial sized facilities and/or private facilities!

John, a friend of ours living in Basel, is also subject to busy-body caretakers who were inexplicably locking the laundry while he was in the process of doing his washing! Presumably because he has the temerity to wash late at night. No one else in the building cared but the Hauswart (caretaker) started locking him out after 10pm. He angrily complained to the managing agents, who warned her off. Thankfully our neighbours and Hauswart are fairly relaxed, so if you are discreet about it is possible to start your laundry at 5-6am, and squeeze some in on Sunday - if someone one else hasn’t already had the idea!

After having thoroughly blown off a bit of steam, I should point out that this is actually an improvement over the situation that we did have. When we first arrived in March, at midnight at the end of the each month a new (blank) schedule covering the month ahead would be posted on the laundry door. A mad scramble would ensue with each tenant/flat putting their name down at a convenient time. The end result was that some people always got the ‘best’ times, people booked more time than they needed ‘just in case’, others missed out completely and you couldn’t really plan ahead. Ultimately the facilities were abused because people didn’t respect the time they did have available, so the managing agents simply laid down the law. Tragedy of the commons averted!

Strangely enough there are hardly any Laundromats in Basel, and they charge a huge amount.