A "Stupid American" Moment

Well, we had our first really embarrassing moment when we tried to do laundry. Our apt. has this tiny little washing machine that you can fit about three items in (more if its things like socks) and of course it's all in Russian, but we figure that it shouldn't be too difficult to work. So, we put our three items in and put some detergent in the little drawer for detergent, we pick what appears to be a cotton cycle and we pick a hot temperature and then there another set of choices that we just guess at and then we hit start. Well it seems to be working so we sit down to watch a movie and half-way through we hear our door-buzzer and someone is frantically beating on our door. We jump up and turn on the lights and notice that there is water all over the floor and we start to have a clue about why someone is frantically beating on our door. We open the door and there's this little old Russian lady who's talking very quickly and gesturing that water is pouring down on her. So, we try to apologize and let her know that we are going to take care of it and this is all mainly through gesturing b/c we don't speak a lick of Russian.

So, what was the cause of all of the drama? Well, the machine is in the bathroom and it gets it's water from a separate hose that's attached to the tub faucet. This part was fine b/c we just had to turn a knob to get the water into the machine. The problem came when the machine needed to empty all the water that it had used and we didn't realize that there was another hose that we needed to run from the back of the machine into the tub. When we started the wash it was going along fine and then it just started dumping the water all over the floor b/c we hadn't put the other hose into the tub. So that was our first real "Stupid American" moment :)