laundry day

I thought today I would comment on a mundane part of life - doing laundry. I was inspired by the beautiful day we are having today. Not a great day to be inside doing laundry, but rather a fantastic day for putting your laundry out to dry. Whenever there is a nice sunny day, you will see laundry hanging out of the apartment windows around here. I think that sometimes they are just airing out comforters, but they also have laundry.



Most of the apartments here (and I would guess in most of Korea) have a small room (about the size of a walk in closet) that is usually outside their kitchen.






Some are finished nicely and will have counter space, maybe a kimchi refrigerator and usually a washer/dryer combo. We live in a place that is circa 1980 and it only has a dryer in it (and sometimes a stray centipede). However, I am lucky to have the dryer. It is old, the wiring looks like an accident waiting to happen and the room gets all drippy from the steam if you don't open a window when you are using the dryer. But it does the job.



I also have one of the "handy" washer/dryers in my kitchen. It is a Tromm, which I think is a good brand. Everything is in Korean. The apartment manager had some instructions in English, so you could at least get the gist of it.

I have never used the dryer portion of it since I have been here though. We had one of these when we lived in Scotland in the early 1990's. It was a disaster. Imagine doing 2 loads of laundry - instead of doing one load in the washer, putting it in the dryer and then starting the next load in the washer, you can't start the second load until the first one is completely done. And it just seemed to dry unevenly and made everything very wrinkly....if it was dry at all. Luckily, we lived in a house with a backyard, so we had a clothesline in the backyard and I was able to hang (at least the jeans) out to finish drying. Unfortunately though, we did have alot of foggy and wet days. So sometimes the inside of our house looked like a dry cleaners. I don't know if the machines have advanced much since the 1990's - most of my friends that have one (with no extra dryer) say that they still don't dry well.



Since we live in a duplex, we do have a small garden and a clothesline contraption of sorts. It hangs down right in front of the window of our living area which is quite lovely (not!).
I don't use it on a regular basis. When we first moved here, I thought it would be nice to hang the towels out to dry. But even with using fabric softener in the wash, they came out all stiff and crinkly. Maybe it is the water here? However, the cleaning lady hangs my spare set of sheets out every week to dry and they don't do that.


Look around, and you will find clotheslines everywhere.

In the harbor area.









Outside restaurants.

I have actually seen fish drying on clotheslines along side the clothes. Couldn't find a picture of that, but this is some sort of marine life drying in the sun.









The gas station. Nothing like the scent of gas fumes to make your laundry smell nice and fresh!