Adventures in Overseas Laundry

Much like baking overseas, doing laundry has often been a struggle for me. This seems to be something many people living abroad for extended periods of time struggle with, especially if they are American. My cousin who lives in Norway does. She rants about it often to me. I never would have expected there to be laundry problems in an idyllic place as Norway.

In Georgia, I’ve had to deal with things I never thought possible in America, such as buying washing powder for machines versus hand washing. Or the fact that Tide is viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. My second host family wouldn’t let me use it. I even wrote the company about the image problem their product here has; I never received a response.

But while living with host family #2, adventures in overseas laundry went to a whole new level. It was here the “washing contraption” briefly (thankfully) entered my life. I use the word “contraption” because calling it a machine was very ambitious, and basically was glorified hand washing. As you can see it is a barrel with a maybe 1/100^th horsepower motor in it. It smacked of the Soviet era. When describing it to my old host sister, she confided to me that her family had one until as recently as 2004 or 2005. Vaimee deda! The barrel had to be filled with water manually, and drained manually. There is a small dial on it giving you the option of either 2 or 4 minutes of extremely gentle, almost imperceptible, spinning. After the “spin” cycle, you had to manually rinse and wring out the clothes. I was not allowed to change the water between loads, so the water was so nasty after 3 loads of wash. I doubt my darks were even remotely clean by the end, and probably dirtier than before I started. The contraption simply created the illusion of clean. Washing my clothes in the manky water of Keyhole Canyon in Zion, even with a dead deer in it, probably would have resulted in cleaner clothes.

While doing laundry the one time I used it, I thought, “Writing a blog post about this isn’t going to result in a washing machine like in Israel.” When I was in Nazareth, I wrote about having to hand wash clothes. The owner of the inn where I worked somehow found my blog, read the post, and decided that a washer was a good idea. A week later a washing machine was in my apartment. The entire time I was doing laundry at the host family’s apartment, I kept telling myself that it was “character building.” However, I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Now I have a delightful Russian language Samsung front-loading washer. I will be taking advantage of its cleaning capabilities tomorrow. After my recent experiences with laundry I will never again complain if I have to use a Laundromat. I will consider a great blessing.