Tuesday January 17, 2006 - Adventures in Euro Appliances and Electronics

Room Temp Boost
Being the rugged, football watching, mechanically inclined, man’s man (hopefully you can sense the sarcasm) that I am, you’d think that after being in Cyprus for three full days I would have been able to figure out these wall heaters in our flat. Luckily today I think I’ve mastered punching in the navi-coordinates from the rotary gurter to keep them operating. Every electrical outlet on the walls throughout the apartment have little switches on them to turn on the power. However “pushed in = on” doesn’t apply to every one scattered throughout the apartment as some are just the opposite. Compound this with these circa 1985 wall heater’s roughly two hour warm up time and their confusing two dials “Automatic Input and” “Room Temp Boost.” Hopefully you can picture the frustrating evening switch flipping/dial turning trial and error in a chilly tile filled apartment for the first three days here.
















The Switch
After a couple days of luke warm showers, we were advised to “turn on the water heater” by Kang and Inigo. I searched our flat high and low for anything remotely looking like a Euro version of a water heater to no avail. Luckily they chimed in with an essential clue the other day and mentioned that there is a lighted switch of the bathroom that has to be turned on about an hour before you want a shower – i.e. no visible water heater. So we’re happy to report the mornings have been starting off much better with the “switch” discovery.

Laundry Man Extraordinaire
Monday was my first attempt of running the washing machine. Not to toot my own horn, but generally I consider myself a laundry man extraordinaire. However, the complexity of the buttons and knobs, lack of instructions for our make and model, and any writing in English (or Greek for that matter) on our Euro washer – I was prepared for quite a struggle figuring it out how to get it going. Fresh from my long emotional and trying battle with the heaters, I was fairly confident that a) there would be soapy

foam all over the kitchen b) there would be smoke or at least an electrical burning smell

or c) nothing would happen. After reading the instructions for some other brand of washer and trying to compare it to the hieroglyphics on ours, I determined that again I would have to rely on trial an error. I chose the first compartment for detergent, pushed the following buttons– on, two different buttons that looked request for a lot of water, “E” – I think it stands for energetic, turned one dial to 600, one dial to 60, and the last dial to 1. After lots of spinning with no water, I adjusted the last dial to 6 – and lo and behold water, soap spinning, and in the end a clean mattress cover.