America! I love her. Why? I'm glad you asked.
Toilet seats. The toilet seat in the restroom down the hall from my office in Islamabad was found broken in half about once a month and had to be replaced. First of all, that bathroom was the most disgusting non-out-house bathroom I've used. But, whatever. What can one be doing with a toilet seat that causes it to break monthly?
But then I encountered frequently breaking toilet seats in Cairo. And then broken toilet seats at our AirBNB apartments in Rome and Paris and our hotel room in Austria. One place I've never once encountered a broken toilet seat: USA. America, where we give a crap about toilet seats!
Washer/dryer capacity. Doing laundry is just not that great. Don't get me wrong, it beats wash boards, but it's laundry. So you stuff in all your whites. One hour later you switch those to the dryer and stuff in all your colors. One hour later you switch those to the dryer and maybe you have a specialty load left over. The whole thing is done in three or four hours perhaps twice a week depending upon size of family.
Now imagine that each load takes 2.5 hours and that you have to do three loads of whites and three loads of colors because the washer has a capacity of roughly 2 cups, which makes it handy for measuring flour but kind of sad for doing laundry. Ugh. I really don't understand how the natives do it, especially since they absolutely love sweating. It is seriously their favorite thing. 80 degrees outside? Perfect, wear a sweater. It's like they're all trying to make weight for a wrestling meet.
Often they don't even have dryers. Just clothes lines. Okay, way better for the environment. I'm cool with that. I respect that. It's just, as a logistical matter, I don't understand. We would need 874 yards of clothes lines. Maybe they just buy one shirt and one pair of pants at a time and go naked for the 5 hours it is being washed, which would explain why Germans love being nude in public.
Katie usually does the laundry, so this problem was on my radar, but not a lived experience. Well, Katie is gone. So I spent the entire day for the last two days doing laundry, and that's with no one around dirtying more items as I go. I have new found respect for Katie's ability to ever achieve anything other than laundry. Also, America! Where you don't have to spend your entire life, sweating and naked, squatting over a broken toilet seat while you wait for the laundry.
2 comments:
Brilliant! I hear you about the washing machines. In Romania we had these tiny ones that were both washers AND "dryers" - in quotes there because they didn't actually get your close even a little dry, so you still had to hang them up. Oh, and it took like 3 hours to do one very small load.
Thanks for writing the best thing I've read all week! I read it to John and we were laughing and laughing! Thanks for the great insights! There are days ago I feel I accomplish is laundry even in the good old USA.
Post a Comment