Airing Your Dirty Laundry

If you live in India, over one billion people will know what color underwear you wear!! You give up caring after about 5 seconds because everywhere you look you will see people's laundry hanging out to dry... balconies, windows, on furniture, the sides of bridges & overpasses, the side of the road, etc. Electricity is very expensive and clothing dryers are few and far between in this part of the world. Most people hand-wash all their laundry... only the wealthy of India have washing machines to wash their clothes.

We don't have a washing machine but I consider us very blessed because some of our friends in the same apartment building share theirs with us. They also have a dryer but we don't use it because there in only one plug outlet so you can either wash your clothes or you can dry them. You can't do both at the same time so I usually do a load and then hang it up to dry all around our apartment since they are sharing their machine with us- I don't want to monopolize it! The washing machine is a small sized one (like the half sized kind you could find in a U.S. apartment).

You can imagine how much laundry we go through between someone wetting the bed, throwing up, spilling food, playing outside, etc. so if our pile gets too big, I can call a laundry guy who comes to our door, bundles up our laundry in a scarf, and brings it back the next day. I have no idea how it doesn't get mixed up with everyone elses' because he doesn't even know our name... but it all comes back folded & pressed. The laundry guys' are on every street... just a little shack where they hand-wash your laundry, beat it out on a rock slab, hang it out to dry, & then press it with an iron that looks like it's from the 1800's. The only drawback is that they charge you per item & your clothes come back looking like you've worn them for 10 years because they beat them out on the rocks so they get really worn-out. The upside, though, is that I didn't have to wash or fold it!! :)

Our neighbor's laundry drying off their balcony