Can we talk laundry????

We have been doing our own laundry more often than not, but occasionally we have sent our laundry in to the hotel - when we have jeans to wash, when the hotel is too posh or forbids doing your own laundry, when it too damp for anything to dry or when we just didn't have time because we were only there for the night and moving on the next day.

In India it was pretty cheap, in China it's quite a bit more expensive. We usually paid 5-15 rupees an item in India (at 85 rupees to the Pound) and in Hong Kong it was about HK$24 for one small load (1-7 lbs) and for another small load in Beijing we paid 59 Yuan (HK$ and Yuan are about 15 to the Pound). Yikes!

If cost doesn't get us to rethink sending our laundry off, then the abuse it takes should! Our poor underwear have had to suffer terribly! In India they ironed them, so the elastic edges have the occasional melt mark, in one place they wrote our room number on them, in Beijing they were stapled with a tag leaving behind some holes in the fabric. My linen shirt will forever have our room number written in the back and both our hankerchiefs (very handy for India where you need to wipe the dust off your face before venturing into a hotel to ask about a room for the night :) have our room number on them. One place returned our washing to us and it smelled moldy! We promptly sent them in at the next hotel as there was no place to hang them in our room.

When we arrived in China it seemed all our clothes had a not so clean smell about them. I tried to do a good job on the washing but we were a bit limited with a bucket (worse when it was a shared bathroom when you had to be quick). If we sent them off I am sure the water they were washing them in was not the cleanest and their method of washing is whacking them with something akin to a cricket bat. We dried them outside in the sun as often as possible. I once hung my just washed shorts on a line on the rooftop terrace and the wind blew them down...right into a freshly swept pile of cow manure! I washed them again and used the button to attach them to the line :)

The place we are now is really nice - far nicer than our usual accomodation. And it's a bit on the humid side here, so things are not going to dry. We will figure it out, though :) It is also considerably colder here, so the clothes are staying cleaner because we are not in sweltering heat wearing jeans and a jacket - we need our jackets so we don't freeze to death! :)

Catch you later!