Tuesday is laundry day. The weekend clothes are ripening and I’m running out of anything fresh from my. The locals are all back at work. Which means it’s time to load up the bag and brave the laundromat without any waiting.
It often seems that in America laundromats are only found in strip malls. The fuzzy TV is way too loud or else unintelligibly soft, tuned to a program you don’t want to watch, like Jerry Springer or All My Children. Looking around, I try to pick out the person most likely to appear on Jerry Springer. It is always a toss-up.
Across the world, it is a bit different. They are called washeterias in Houston, and you would more likely be watching Univision than ABC. In Laos, wash & fold services were so cheap that I felt guilty of making someone else do my laundry. In Sweden, I could almost have purchased a new Wal Mart wardrobe for the cost of three loads.
Sure, I wash in the sink, but there is some travel stink that need to be tackled with an automatic machine. And no matter how thorough you think you are, after about three hand washings of underwear or socks, they can start to develop personalities of their own. My laundry experiences bring back some memories of travel.