L'omino bianco

I am wandering through the Standa, the supermarket that lives under the Oviesse on Via Roma, absently sticking a packet of "mix grattugiato" (delicious grated cheese) into the crook of my elbow and vaguely wishing I had remembered to grab one of those cool basket/carts when I see a swatch of familiar light blue in the distance. (Yeah, okay, it's about a meter away, but it sounded more dramatic the other way.) I turn my head to investigate.

Yess! I think to myself. It is a pile of laundry detergent, with some kind of 2-for-1 deal.

Specifically, it is Omino Bianco laundry detergent. The blue kind (I think the flavor is actually called muschio bianco, which I don't really get - is muschio musk? Because it doesn't really smell like what I thought that would smell like. The picture looks like muguet - which I think is called lily of the valley in English - but then other brands have scents called mughetto, and presumbly that is the Italian equivalent to muguet. Or maybe musk and muguet are synonyms? Boh). Anyway. It is my favorite laundry detergent here in Italy (well, ever, actually) and it was quite the lucky discovery.

In my first apartment here, I was only living there for a week with one of the other teachers and we decided it wasn't worth it to figure out how the washer worked (for some reason the instructions were only in French and German, and I didn't want to be responsible for deciphering them). So we handwashed our stuff. With fabric softener. Because we bought that by mistake. It smelled nice, though, and had a cuddly bear on the front.

In the second apartment, the one with the crazy man, the washer was located in the (dubiously clean) kitchen and smelled like mold. I elected not to use it, which meant dragging all my stuff to a nearby (sort of) washing machine place (the actual name will come to me... someday), stuffing them all in the same machine (because I was poor at the time), having them not dry as a consequence, and thus having drying clothes draped damply around my room for the next two days. Yum. The other unfortunate thing about that particular adventure was that I zipped into Acqua e Sapone (an excellent store) to grab some detergent on my way and it was right before closing time and I was so excited about having successfully found the place again and I was poor, remember, so I just grabbed the first cheap-ish bottle of stuff with flowers on the front that I saw and that was that. I figured the word on the label - candeggina - was probably the brand or something.

Yeah, no. Candeggina is bleach. Flower-scented bleach, in this particular case, but bleach nonetheless. Oh, and the third unfortunate thing about the washing machine place adventure was that it was relatively close to the train station (sketchy part of town) and this Egyptian guy showed up and I was dumb enough to answer his what's your name/where are you from questions and then he wanted to talk the whole time my laundry was going. Sigh.

So that one evening a couple of weeks later when I had moved into the Good Apartment (finally) and was strolling around Esselunga and picked up a bottle of blue Omino Bianco laundry detergent and successfully did my laundry and my room smelled delightfully of flowers... it was nice. Finally. So the "little white man" (who, parenthetically, is actually a little black stick figure man wearing a white t-shirt) always reminds me of that feeling of yesss! My clothes are clean and I own a drying rack and my room smells good and I didn't blow up the washer and I don't live with the creepy man any more!

Back to Standa. The trick about the blue Omino Bianco stuff is that no one ever has it. They often have the green one (aloe, or something) and the white one (savon de Marseille), but not the blue one. It is elusive. You have to check the detergent aisle in every supermarket every time you go in order to have a steady supply. And even then... so this is a good deal. I must buy some. I have been using some other stuff that the housemates bought (it smells like roses, which is nice too, but just not the same) but now I have found Omino Bianco. Huzzah! (Yeah, it's the little things in life, right?)

I turn around with my mix grattugiato and my bread and whatever else and scurry back to get a basket/cart. I haul my prize home. I do some laundry and my room smells half like muschio bianco (whatever it is) and half like the summery smell of sun on the cobblestones... or sun on something, anyway (it's very sunny here right now). I am happy.

The only thing is... now that I have managed to bring home not one, but two (!!) bottles of the stuff, it occurs to me that I am only here for another two and a half weeks. That's probably not even long enough to use up two whole bottles of it. I am sad.