Lost in translation

I can’t tell you how many times over the last few days that we’ve encountered interesting challenges with the Spanish language. First of all my command of the language isn’t great to begin with, but decent enough to get by. As always, I understand conversations much better than I can speak them myself.

Secondly, the “Spanish” spoken here is really Castilian, which has different sounds and even vocabulary than I’m accustomed to.

Yesterday I asked my host for advice about how to dry our clothes after washing them in the washing machine conveniently located in our kitchen. Weeks ago, when booking our Airbnb stops, one of my criteria was that it have a washing machine. Most places didn’t have dryers so I just decided that we would figure that out upon arrival. Now it was time to figure it out.

As you can see, he directed me to find a clothesline in the closet. Despite my doubts about how we were going to string up a clothesline in the apartment, I began my search. Several minutes later, with no clothesline in hand, I had a thought that maybe something got lost in translation.

Thats when I discovered a clothes drying rack neatly folded away in one of the closets! It took me a google search to figure out how to use it, but sure enough it worked great. The climate is so dry here that it takes no time for clothes to be wearable very quickly!

Now…as for getting the washing machine to work in the first place, that’s a whole different translation tale. See if you can figure out how to decipher the hieroglyphs printed on the control panel.