I bought my MP3 player in the US, so it obviously came with an US charger. Figures I didn’t think of buying an adapter there, and somehow I couldn’t find a cheap adapter here yet.

The charger doesn’t say it can do 230 V, but according to the manufacturer it does. And someone has opened one, the chips can.

We have some standard adapters here, but they don’t fit. You can plug in some US devices, but not this one: the charger’s plug (crappy US electrocute-yourself “standard”…) is just two metal stripes coming out of it.

The adapter’s socket however is inset about 1 cm (which is reasonable for safety purposes, and common, if not required in Europe), and the charger obviously is too wide to fit into the adapter…

The workaround I’ve found is funny: I still have an adapter I bought to plug European devices into US sockets. This cheap adapter ($1 or so) can also take US plugs. If I put it inbetween I can make up for the inset.

So it’s US-Device goes into a tiny most-to-US adapter, which goes into most-to-European adapter.

Wikimedia Commons on power plugs and sockets, including the sane german/french models (aka CEE 7/7 “Schuko” plug, CEE 7/17 Europlug)