Foreign Perspectives

The normal landries couldn’t cope with the volume that we needed and were quite expensive so we started looking for an industrial laundry or rather an Laverie Industriel which seemed likely to be the proper phrase for such a thing in that the little laundries were called laveries. We looked, and looked and looked without success. That didn’t really surprise us as the organisation of the French phone book is unbelieveably bad and the yellow pages can only be used to look up the phone numbers of places when you know which town or village they’re in. So we struggled on for a bit and the backlog of ironing built up.

Eventually, one of the local hotel owners called round to say “hi” and we found out where the laundry was. It’s not called a laverie industriel though, it’s called a blanchisserie as you can see from their truck.

One of the things that the laundry deliveries makes quite obvious is that France basically shuts down over the Winter. That changes the running order for laundry volume considerably as we don’t close therefore our little trolley is filled to the top unlike those of the larger hotels which, as you can see, are only about half full.

Anyway, be aware that even if you know the French word for a small version of something, it doesn’t always follow that you can work out the name for the larger version of the same thing.