Day 43 Laundry, Part II

There’s really not an easy way for me to describe the horrid stench that has been emanating from the garbage bag full of laundry that is currently sitting on my floor. If you recall my previous laundry post from about 30 days ago, you might remember that I’ve been relying on my own laundress skills to keep my clothes clean. After 43 days, these skills have officially failed me, and I am now a proud client of “Aping Washclothes,” located off the noodle alley. Today I put on a t-shirt (I thought it was clean, I am quite sure I washed it sometime last week and haven’t worn it since) and almost gagged. So I got out my eco-friendly grocery bag, picked some precious pieces of clothing to relinquish to the cleaning people, and headed out to find a solution to this very smelly problem. In total, I had two t-shirts, four pairs of underwear and two sports bras. You’d think these would be pretty cheap to wash, but no, it costs something like 10 quai per shirt; the total was 48 quai and I can go pick them up in 3 days. About 8 dollars. Three days. Is that ridiculous or what? At this point though, I’d be willing to pay a whole lot more for some good smelling clothes. I guess I shouldn’t get my hopes up, because there’s a pretty good chance that these clothes won’t actually smell very good when I get them back, but I am at least hoping that they will smell better than they did before.

This might be really pathetic but I think I will end up ranking laundry pretty high on my “things that were hard in Shanghai” list at the end of the summer. Food? Easy, I love it. Chopsticks? Better than forks. Living out of a suitcase? Fantastic. 95 degree weather? Piece of cake. But this laundry issue is really getting me. I may or may not shed a few tears of gratitude when I can go home and wash and dry several huge loads of laundry in my superstar laundry room.