Der Trockner ist kaputt.

A couple of weeks ago, our dryer broke.  It is normal for me to run a load of laundry on more than one cycle because it takes that long for the clothes to get dry.  After running one load of laundry through the dryer for about 6 hours, I decided that there was something wrong with the dryer and Brian was going to have to look at it.  When he got home, he discovered that some plastic pieces that connected the heating element to the dryer were completely burnt through, therefore, no heat for the dryer.

Since none of the furniture in our apartment belongs to us, we had to find out who the dryer belonged to before we could either try to fix it or replace it.  We e-mailed MTU and the woman in charge of the apartment wasn't sure about the dryer and told us to contact our landlord to see if he knew who owned it.  Whenever we contact our landlord, it takes a minimum of a week to hear back from him.  It took Brian over a week and two e-mails to finally hear back from him that it was either MTU's or was left here from a previous tenant - he did not own it.  After letting MTU know this, it was decided that we would just get a new dryer since this one was at least 10 years old and probably not worth fixing.

Brian and I headed to the store to get an estimate on how much we would spend on a dryer because MTU needed to know that before we purchased on.  We found a brand we knew and picked a dryer that was in the middle of the price range.  It's amazing the amount of money you could spend on a dryer if you had it laying around!  We reported back to MTU and got the go-ahead to buy a new dryer.

Since we already knew which dryer we wanted, we walked into the store and just needed to figure out how to buy it and where to put it in our car.  As we were looking at it again, a salesman approached us and started talking to us in German.  We told him in German that we only speak a little German and wondered if he spoke English.  He definitely did not!  We knew this was going to be an interesting purchase!

The man kept talking in German and was showing us the differences between this dryer that we wanted and the one in the same brand that was one step down.  He was pointing at things as he talked in German, so we were able to figure out what he was talking about.  We discovered the one we wanted had a display for the time remaining on a load, it had a shiny metal interior, and had a setting for wool.  I knew a few words that he was saying, but it was definitely helpful that he was pointing at things!

We then told him (in poor German) that we wanted to buy the one we had looked at.  We went to the computer and he put our name in.  They already had our information since we had previously bought a prepaid cell phone from this store.  Thankfully we didn't have to go through the process of telling him our address because the Germans can never seem to understand what we are saying when we tell them our street name.

He then asked us a question that we weren't sure about.  Something about "mitnehmen" and "lieferservice".  I know that "liefer" means something about delivery because that is what was on the top of our receipt when we bought our IKEA couch that had to be delivered.  I also knew that "nehmen" means to take and that "mit" means with, so I decided that "mitnehmen" means to take with.  Once I figured that out, I told the man "mitnehmen", but Brian was still a bit lost so I had to explain to him what the man wanted to know.  He then told us how to get our car to the door where we would pick up the dryer. 

The dryer fit in the car and wasn't too hard to get into our apartment.  It just plugged in and we were back in business!  I was no longer going to have crunchy clothes!

Here's a picture of the new dryer that we are very proud of because we were able to purchase it all in German!