Alex:
Those are two neat rooms, I'll say. Pictures I've seen of other shared laundries are often much less neat -- I'm not referring to the how messy and/or clean the rooms are, it just looks like those two look like they were designed from the start to accommodate the users, instead of "oops, another tenant wants to use the common laundry, quick, add another hookup by Tuesday morning..."
In any case, not having used shared rooms like that before (without coin op, for example), I'm told that many shared laundry rooms in Europe have a way for the tenant to shut off the water and electricity from their apartments, or perhaps some other locked box in the laundry room itself. Is that true or even common, or do people have to deal with nasty folks abusing their equipment/supplies every once in a while?
Cheers,
-- Paulo.
PS: I think I have not used Weißer Riese since the late 70's and I don't think it even had enzymes back then. Has it gotten better? At that point in time my German neighbors would prefer to import OMO and Persil, I think we had one neighbor that every once in a while would get Skip. The box certainly looks very attractive, do they still do the ads with say, a helicopter pulling a giant sheet from a swimming pool, like they did back then?
I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound "judgy", it's just that I'm thinking of a time when I was a kid and almost everybody I knew had kids too, because those were the people I was interacting with, and kids do make a mess and generate soiled/stained clothing -- I suppose for people with no children whose clothes are mostly clean would have no trouble with Weißer Riese, and the smell back then was certainly nice.
