Other Unique Things, Part One: Inside

A recent post with an image of our over-the-sink dish drainer was immensely popular, much more so than I had predicted it would be. Along the same lines this post and the next one will offer a few examples of other unique things, both within and beyond the house, that I have discovered during my two weeks here so far.

The good news: We have a washer and dryer right here in our apartment, in a little laundry/utility room behind the kitchen where I sometimes sit on the floor and talk with my friends via Skype late at night while everyone else is in bed, asleep.

The bad news: There are no words or directions on the control panel of the washer, and all the temperature settings are of course in degrees Celcius. So far nothing has shrunk into the Barbie-clothes realm and my clothes seem mostly clean.
Some like it hot: Solar power warms our water during the day with the assistance of a device called a dud shemesh, or sun heater. The dud is a massive cistern that sits on the roof and absorbs the rays of the sun, using energy already present in the environment to make our showers comfortable. This is an effective and eco-friendly approach that works well until someone somewhere in the building washes all of lot of dishes and all the hot water gets used up. Then we need to use our own individual dud that is in a closet in the hallway. The switch looks like this:

Let there be light: Who decided to put light switches a) outside of the rooms they affect b) so high up that no one under the age of eight can use them?Coming soon: Unique things found outside the house.