Friday, October 23, 2009

The Boring Stuff



It may seem from what I've been telling you that living here in Paris has been non-stop excitement, glamour and glory.  Would I lie to you?  But then you have to do laundry.

We actually do have a washer and dryer in the apartment.  In fact they inhabit the same small body, a combination machine tucked away under the counter in the bathroom.  A full load for our little helper would be a sheet, with maybe some underwear thrown in for balance.  Toss a towel in as well and you're pushing its limits.  To wash this load requires about one hour and ten minutes.

Yes, that's right, over an hour.  And then you have to dry it.  Depending on just what you have in there, you can select ten minutes, thirty minutes, fifty minutes, or more.  Ten minutes to dry virtually anything is to laugh.  Suffice it to say that the 50 minute button is the most often used, and that sometimes several times in a row.

You will recall that we just washed and dried a sheet.  One sheet.  OK, maybe I exaggerate.  There may have been a couple of pillowcases as well.  There's usually another sheet still to do, not to mention the towels.  And the shirts.  And the T-shirts.  And the undies, although usually we hang those to dry on the nifty towel-warmer bars they have here.  And of course the jeans.

So when people ask us how we spend our time in Paris, we lie.  We're actually doing laundry.

3 comments:

Karin B (Looking for Ballast) said...

LOL!! Great blog! Very humorous. :D It's true, huh. Laundry takes a lot of time...

We have a huge laundry line (with four or five cords on it, total) hanging from wall-to-wall in the girl child's bedroom. I wash a load and then hang it for a couple of days on the line. I can fit a total four loads on the line. It's a bit annoying to have to do it this way, but I have gotten used to it.

Happy Laundering! :)

ninal said...

My Paris rental this summer, had a fabulous plastic rack, that took a load of wash, and it dried either overnight, or during the day, if we were going to be out all day. It had a small footprint, so it fitted into the bathroom. I believe it came fron BHV, and could I have brought one back to Boston, I would have done so!

Shelli said...

We've used drying racks in previous rentals but the one we're in now doesn't have one. If the next one is also sans rack we'll buy one. (At BHV bien sûr!)