Laundry

I'm becoming obsessed with laundry. Perhaps it is because I see it everywhere. People hang laundry in the darnedest places. Sometimes there are clothes waiting to dry, hung between trees on the street. If you look up while you are walking on the sidewalk, you will likely see all sorts of thing being hung to dry from long poles or plastic laundry hangers.

Perhaps it is because you have to think about laundry- meaning, you have to plan. While we were in the hotel for five weeks, even though we sent some things down to the hotel laundry service, I washed many things by hand and hung them in the bathroom; the line was small and the drying time long. As a result, I have a bit of a backlog of things to be washed. When we finally moved into the apartment, we quickly went out and bought detergent and sorted out our clothing. Then we had the landlord explain the washing process on the machine since all of the instructions are in Chinese. As you can see, it is a small machine; it only does small loads of laundry. A wash also takes about two hours- this includes a 30 minute cycle of "drying". I put the latter in quotation marks, because it is more like a steam than a dry. When the clothes come out, they still have to be hung out, but the drying time is cut at least in half. If you leave your load in the machine for longer than 30 minutes, it gets really wrinkled (and we don't have an iron). Laundry takes patience... and a bit of planning. Washing and wearing on the same day is not very likely.

No wonder the maids here do laundry nearly every day.