Plugholes

So…there’s “shut your plug ‘ol”, wishing someone would be quiet, there’s “bathwater down the plughole” also known as drains in the US and then there are plug end receptacles.  Who would have thought that these would ever be a thing I would feel the need to talk about?

As we have lived in several countries, we are collecting household items with a variety of plug end types.  We have US and UK as that is where we’ve been so far but we made a conscious effort to not bring too many to Italy so we wouldn’t have to continue to keep up with adapters, etc.  Once we got our place in Italy, we proceeded to buy a few things – kettle, hair-dryer, etc.  Nothing crazy.

Learning about electrics in other countries is always fun.  Swear.  Grounded, not grounded, thick plug, thin plug, 2 prong, 3 prong – it’s a melting pot of options.  It shouldn’t matter for what we buy in Italy: Italian plugs for Italian plugholes, right?  Wrong.

We brought our lovely Italian appliances back to the house and none of them really fit the plughole.  That’s when it hits us.  These are not Italian plugholes.  They are Swiss.  WTF?!?!  So the nice man that lived in the house before us was Swiss and he brought all his Swiss stuff to Italy.  And apparently changed EVERY SINGLE ONE of the plugholes.

Our first week there we had 2 “universal” adapters so we couldn’t have lights in the lounge AND have the kettle on and certainly no lamps on upstairs.  When you have to choose between a lamp and a fan its mildly frustrating, to say the least.  As a result, we’ve purchased another 6 so that we can space them out around the house.  My darling husband, on the other hand, is determined to change out all the plugholes.  And learn how to do it in Italian.  Best of luck to him – I’m sticking with my universal adapters for now.