The window of my room, out of which I often hung various dripping items of clothing. |
Once I decided to live abroad, I set out to do the research. The Bell-curve emotional roller coasters that you’ll ride during your stay. The myriad of cultural and gastronomical differences. Culture shock – and the hush-hush unspoken-of reverse-culture-shock upon re-entry. I read the books. I talked to those who had been there. I took notes and trained, and, when it was time to go, I was ready for everything and anything.
Except laundry.
After the first week, and one day awaking and finding no clean socks in my drawer, I girded my loins for the inevitable task of doing laundry (something I am not good at even in my home country).
And, as it turns out, when doing laundry in a foreign country, make certain you first have a Ph.D. In physics.
Finding a blanchisserie was hard enough. It took maybe a half-hour. As it turned out, there was one only five feet from my dorm, but it was hidden behind a small copse of plantain trees. Then, when I took down all my laundry and realized that the washers were only big enough for one pair of underwear and a sock (just one sock, not a pair) … paid two Euro … and waited about an hour and a half for the cycle to run … I quickly understood why there was a little sink in my room.
Drying the clothes was another adventure. I had the choice of paying one Euro fifty to use an itty-bitty dryer which fit my pair of underwear (not the sock), or line-drying. I did not have a line. I did, however, have a room on the eighth story. My sopping unmentionables often ended up hanging on the bars of my push-out window.
It’s always amusing air-drying clothes. Especially where you live in a region where it’s fairly windy, especially in the afternoon on the eighth story. It’s a good gauge for determining when your laundry is finished, though. When the laundry blows off the window to the ground below, and you trudge down eight flights of stairs and search the bushes below for your bra … you know it’s dry.
What was a fashion-conscious American girl to do? And how did the French – second ranking in the fashion world only to Italy – cope with such sub-standard facilities?
True, I was at a college dormitory – which, no matter what graduation speeches and cards tell you, is not the real world. Still, the situation caused me to draw several conclusions:
1) The French don’t have as many clothes as we do.
2) The French (God bless ‘em) don’t wash their clothes as much as we do.
3) I have far too many clothes.
After the sixth load of socks and unmentionables, I began to wonder if, perhaps, this unknown and un-understood concept of French laundry was not a bad idea. We Americans are so germophobic, what with OSHA and antibacterial hand sanitizer and Febreeze and everything. Do my jeans really need washed after every wearing? Wouldn’t it be okay if maybe I just aired out that shirt if I only wore it for a few hours? And why on earth did I bring four black sweaters that looked practically the same?
After the first month, I moved into my host family’s home, where they had a slightly larger washer and many, many clotheslines. And my host mother did my laundry, which I greatly appreciated. (To my credit, I offered many times to wash my own clothes. However, a previous American student had broken the washer when she had tried to do her laundry. Chalk it up to yet another inconsistency between American and French laundry habits.)
But, thanks to my experience with the blanchisserie de la résidence universitaire, I tried to be a little more understanding when throwing my clothes in the hamper, and wouldn’t throw in every piece of clothing I owned.
At least, not all at once.
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