The world's best invention has arrived

This is probably one of the most exciting announcements I've made so far on this blog... get ready for it...WE FINALLY HAVE OUR OWN WASHING MACHINE IN OUR APARTMENT!

Before you go and make fun of me for this terribly exciting announcement, let me explain. For 4 months, every time we have needed to do laundry, on our weekends we have had to stuff our dirty clothes into our big suitcases, drag them 8 minutes down the road, up and down curbs, across puddles, and across streets, and into the laundromat to do laundry with bums. The worst part is that it was $40 each time we did laundry!! Highway robbery, I know.

Clearly hating the laundromat

So after a long time debating and researching different brands of machines, we finally decided on a Siemens washer/dryer combo.   Combo machines have a bad rep for being able to actually dry clothes decently. So buying a combo machine was a bit of a risk in the first place. The second risk was buying it from the shadiest retail store in town, 'Maxi Discount'...

Here's how delivery day went down.  Our landlord required that a professional, certified plumber install the washing machine in the apartment to avoid any mechanical issues that could arise with a less experienced person installing the machine. So....

1. I call Maxi Discount the day before to say that we only need delivery service, not installation service.
2. But of course the next day Maxi Discount still arrives at the apartment with an installation guy.
3. Ryan (who is home to let the delivery guys in) insists that their installation guy is not allowed to install the machine based on the requirement of our landlord. 
4. Maxi Discount guys proceed to threaten Ryan by saying that we will lose the warranty on the machine if they don't install it. 
5. Ryan calls me and ask me what to do. I say that I have no idea, try to ask some colleagues with experience and they say they have no idea. So Maxi Discount guys leave and we lose the warranty on machine. 
6. Professional plumber arrives an hour later and tries to install machine, and surprise, surprise - its broken (it cannot drain any water).
7. Professional plumber speaks no English so Ryan calls me, hands the phone to the plumber and I hand the phone to my secretary at work and they speak to each other in French and eventually everything is translated and the message is conveyed that the machine is definitely broken and we need to call Maxi Discount guys again to have them deliver a new machine (keep in mind Maxi Discount guys just told us that we lost the warranty on the machine, so there is no way they are going to bring us a new machine now...) 
8. We decide we have had enough of this ridiculously frustrating machine already and we leave it half full with water to go skiing for the weekend and decide to just deal with the headache later.  
9. We return to the apartment on Sunday night and Ryan pushes the on button and it works PERFECTLY. No idea why it was broken one day and fixed the next, but oh well... just another day in confusing expatriate paradise! Somehow every process here ends up being extremely frustrating but rewarding at the end in a strange, surprising way :)

The punchline for those that were bored to tears by my story above - we now have a washer/dryer combo (which dries excellently) that you can use whenever you come visit!