Laundry is a little more old-style here. Not that I’m down by the river pounding it on a rock or anything…which wouldn’t work because the river is black, but it’s a lot more labour intensive. For starters, I can’t really understand the washing machine. I can wash a load in cold water and spin it dry. There are few dryers here as electricity is very costly. They have those fancy-dancy two-in-one models that apparently wash AND dry but we use the time-honoured air dry method. Which is fine if it’s sunny out but a bit more time-consuming if it rains. Also, we only have one bath towel each and one set of sheets so you need to make sure you have lots of time to dry everything. When I lived here 23 years ago and we dried laundry on the deck, white clothing rapidly turned grey from the pollution. I think I’m in a nicer neighbourhood now, in that there are no factories or trains in my backyard, (though we do have a garbage incinerator though it apparently only runs at night for a variety of reasons), but I think it’s also less polluted in some ways. You aren’t actually ALLOWED to smoke in the streets. They have these smoke pits in various spots–for sure outside the train stations–and, for the most part people actually use them. That being said, you can still smoke in a lot of the restaurants here.
Anyway, back to laundry. Long term cold water washing doesn’t seem to get stuff CLEAN, but I can’t read the machine and have no idea how to change it. Better call in the Japanese friends. Cold water wash does give me limited opportunities to ruin stuff though. To dry laundry they have all kinds of cool little clip hangers and poles, but what I really want is a stand up rack. They’re not so popular here for some reason, maybe because they blow over in the wind? Most people have bars that hang from their deck that they hook their handy-dandy clip hanger laundry things to (see photo on title page). People also do laundry here pretty much every day. Probably because it’s so frickin’ hot and their clothes get dirty fast. I air-dried a thick towel today on my deck in under an hour. Seriously. It was ridiculously hot. I’m feeling quite noble and environmentally friendly, though I think the fact that they burn my trash at night kind of cancels that out.

Please note that this article was in tribute to my good friend, Susan–the most environmentally friendly person I know who always air dries her laundry;-)