Laundry

I have long been wondering how I would do laundry here, especially considering that by the time we move into our home stays (if we even move in to our home stays!), we will have been living in hotels for a month. (Now please tell me, how does living in a hotel with other Americans help improve my Arabic? If I had known this I might have just gotten an apartment close to the University. Can I tell you how much I am beginning to hate hotels where they don’t change your sheets and they refill your shampoo bottle each day with lemon-scented Ajax? But these are stories for other days.)

Since I brilliantly realized that I should bring way more clothes than they suggested so I wouldn’t have to do laundry so much (even though everyone continually makes fun of all the luggage I have—who’s laughing now?), I didn’t really have a problem with it in Egypt. I had to wash one shirt, so I washed it in my sink with body wash (I forgot to bring my Tide with me! I knew I had forgotten something) and hung it up in the shower to dry.

Once we got to the Ambassador Hotel in Amman, however (our home for 2-3 weeks), I realized that laundry might be somewhat of an issue. I am used to washing one or two things in the sink and hanging them up to dry (I can thank my disgusting apartment in Provo for that skill), but all of my clothes in the sink might be a problem.

The next solution is naturally the bathtub, but somehow my roommate and I were blessed with a “shower space” with a two foot by two foot square of tile protected by a six-inch ridge surrounding it, with a shower curtain hanging down to about 8 inches above the top of the “shower ridge.” (This makes showering quite a problem, as the water sprays out all over the floor. No wonder they have a drain in the middle of the bathroom floor and not just the shower!) And there is no stopper for the tub (there is no need! Why would anyone need six inches of water?).

Laundry, therefore, has turned into an adventure. The other day I bought some laundry soap called “Sar” which also doubles as dishwasher soap, kitchen cleaner, and a few other things. (How good can a sop named after a deadly disease be? And anything that is so multi-purpose is going to give you strange results.) To stop the drain in my “shower space,” I used a plastic bag filled with orange peels. Then I filled up the “square” with as much water as possible and dumped a bunch of “Sar” in, hoping to take some of the “Cairo smell” (a mixture of cigarette smoke, disgustingly sweet water pipe smell, sweaty bodies, urine, trash, and other filth) out of my clothes. Then, I dropped a few articles in, let them soak in Sar for a couple of hours, and then rinsed them out and hung them up to dry for two days.

The result? I still smell like Cairo. And I have decided today to look for some stronger laundry soap. The Sar just didn’t cut it for me.