How to do laundry

I have decided to give this whole blogging thing a try. If this doesn’t work out, I will have only devoted hours of time to my online “diary.”

I feel I must first create the atmosphere of a writer, though for myself, I use the term loosely. Wine, check; Triple-cream Cambozola cheese and crackers, check; Fragrant candle burning, check; Singing in the Rain (musical) playing in the background, check. Apparently, I think “writing atmosphere” embodies a Frenchwoman from the 50’s who likes romance…ok, I can deal with that. Warning, you all know how my mind works from my Facebook statuses and tweets (shameless plug for Twitter, @adrienneyerzy), random and short. Let’s begin, 1^st blog, take 1!

A few years ago I had the opportunity to go to Indonesia with a small group consisting of 9 people, 3 ladies and 6 guys. The 9 of us willingly crammed into a very small apartment on the twenty-something floor. I do not know the square footage of the place, but to give you some sort of reference point, I will tell you that the 3 of us ladies shared a queen sized bed for 2 months…something reminiscent of the 3 Stooges, I think. Now you sort of get the picture.

While there are MANY stories to tell from this trip, I want to focus on just one. Like a first date, some mystery must be left for later.

When our team arrived at the apartment, we realized right away that we would need to purchase a water tank, which uses bottles similar to the large bottles that the Alhambra man might bring to your office or home. We tried purchasing normal liter sized bottles for a while (as we couldn’t drink water from the tap), but they were used up too quickly and after collecting a full set of empty, plastic bottles, we decided our collection, though impressive, was too large for our cabinets and that the water cooler was a better idea.

We also notice right away that our apartment didn’t have a washer or dryer, though this was expected and really not an issue as most of us had taken many international trips where we had to wash laundry by hand, no big deal.

 

We, the ladies of the group, took turns washing our clothes in the sink or tub. Whites, by themselves, dark colors by themselves, in small “loads” because there just wasn’t room to do everything at once, I will not bore you with the rest. One of the guys, however, had a different plan. One day I turned the corner to find him vigorously shaking a large water jug (I will add that a fellow teammate had procured a harmonica from a cereal box and repeatedly played random chords over and over…this was going on in the background). Of course, I had to figure out what was going on and to my surprise (followed by doubled over laughter) he had decided to put his laundry into the water jug so that he could do all his dark laundry at one time, to “save time”.

 

I am hoping you are picture someone using the “Shake Weight” only this is about 30 times bigger and heavier! I laughed with tears in my eyes for quite a few minutes, then sensing that the “show” was almost over, I looked again to see him pull everything out of the water jug…and then put them right back in again! I couldn’t figure out what he was doing, so I asked and his reply? “Rinse-cycle!”

 

I don’t know how else to end this other than to mention we only bought 2 water jugs to refill with water for the 2 months we were there…So we all experienced one man’s laundry, one way or another.