Getting settled

Daemen College is a small private college in Buffalo, New York. You can read more about Daemen here. It’s located in a beautiful, suburban setting. There are a great number of other colleges in the area!  But more about Daemen later.

I live in a place called Collegiate Village (CV for short). If you click on the name, you can go to their website. It has a free shuttle connection to a number of other universities and colleges in the area. On weekends, the shuttle also takes residents to a number of great stores and shopping malls, like Walden Galleria. I haven’t been there yet but I plan to visit as soon as I can.  It’s a really great service, and I personally think it’s wonderful for having something like it available for the students. It certainly makes getting to classes and around the city easy to us.

I’m quite happy with my apartment. It’s fairly big by Finnish standards, with a really good kitchen(with a really big oven and dish washer!), a washing machine / dryer combo, a small living area and a bathroom (with a tub!).  I got myself a WiFi connection as soon as I could – a basic WiFi router at a local Best Buy cost around 40 USD -- and the speed is really quite good, up to 18-25 Mbs (I tested it :).

CV has a number of services available for the residents. The best by far for my purposes is the fitness center. It’s really big, and well maintained. You can do a basic workout routine just like that, without ever having to walk more than a hundred yards or so from your apartment. They also have a gym for basketball and other games, a small movie theater and a really good café / convenience store combo. The convenience store is really quite small, only a quite small selection of daily necessities is available but the café is great. The food is really nice. 

Anyway, here’s more about my experiences with the washing machine / dryer combo. It’s a basic Kenmore (a U.S. brand). And it’s really easy to use!

So easy that I had some problems with it. Just in case anybody else ever needs to know how to run the thing, here’re the instructions:  first, choose the load (medium for me), then choose the temperature for wash and rinse (warm/warm or warm/cold). Warm’s roughly equivalent to 40 degrees Celsius). Then push in the dial and choose the program, and then pull the dial out. (Yes, the instructions are printed on the front, but who reads instructions?) 

That starts water running. As soon as you hear the water coming in, lift the lid and pour in the liquid / detergent. Wait for a bit to let it mix in properly, and then put your clothes in and close the lid. That’s it! It takes about an hour or so for the cycle to run (depends of your choice of the program of course). After the program has run, take out your laundry and put them in the dryer. Choose the program (really dry or less dry, it’s a sliding scale), and hit the switch. Remember to close the washer’s lid, otherwise the dryer won’t start. That’s it!

Now that I've figured out how to do my washing in CV, I'll next write a little bit about how I cooked my very first dinner in Buffalo.