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Cleen Spirit
Today I did my laundry for the first time ever by hand. I was certainly
interested in figuring out how to do laundry this way, but I was primarily
motivated by the apparent lack of available socks and underwear in my
closet.
The washing part went wonderfully. I found two sinks side by side and
poured the water and put in some soap and soaked and rinsed and squeezed
and had a grand ole time. Washing machines here cost about 1 pound 50
pence per load, which ends up being about US$2.40, so I took great pride
in the fact that I was saving my money and enjoying myself as I watched
various people come in and out and pump coins in to the washer. "I don't
need that silly technology" I thought.
Then came the drying. I had been sort of blocking that part of the
process out of my mind, piling wet clothing on the table by the sinks,
assuming that I would be able to get it dry when the time came. Dryers
here cost about 40 pence (~65 cents) per 10 minute cycle and I thought
that surely that was a ridiculous waste of time and money when one could
just dry clothing in one's room.
Observation: Laundry weighs a lot when it's wet. We take that for granted
in shuffling wet clothes to the dryer over the mere five or six inches
that the two appliances sit apart from each other in our dimly lit
basements. You appreciate it a lot more when you have to shuffle up
stairs and around corners.
So I started hanging up laundry various places in my room...on chairs,
out the window, on the sink, on my bed (hey, wait...), on my desk (no
place to sit or to write), on my closet doors, and on a makeshift
clothesline that I'd transported from the US (there was no reason to
believe they'd have rope here, okay?). My room looked like a garage sale,
and there were dripping sounds coming from every corner. My floor was
wet and my bed-spread wetter. I left the dripping to find the porter and
purchased 1 pound 60 pence worth of drying tokens, forty minutes of
drying well spent (laundry is heavy going down stairs too).
In two weeks, I'm going to experience more local culture as I buy washing
tokens and make use of the fabulous Scottish washing-machine technology.
Chris
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