Before I came, I wondered how laundry was dealt with. I wasn’t sure if I would do it myself, and where, or if it was common to send laundry out to a service. I found out, when I got here, that the villa has its own washing machine.
As I’ve said, our kitchen is outside of the main building, in a separate, smaller building. Around and in between the main building and the kitchen is an enclosed courtyard. The washing machine is in this courtyard, set in a brick depression and under a roof; a set of 4 clotheslines is nearby.
To use the washing machine, you actually have to go into the kitchen, unplug the stove, and plug in the washer (the power cord for the washer snakes around the courtyard and into a hole in the wall of the kitchen building. So, you can’t cook and wash at the same time, at least not using the stove.
The washing machine is a little smaller than U.S. ones, but has a lot of options: how high should the water level be, how long is the wash cycle, how many rinse cycles, do you want an air dry spin cycle and if so, for how long, what type of load are you doing (delicate, blanket, jeans, etc). Sometimes I input all that and then accidentally press “power” instead of “start,” thus turning off the machine and having to start the selection process again.
As the machine works, the used water just floods out the bottom, filling up the brick depression until it drains away. So, the machine appears to be floating in a pool of gross water.
The machine is next to the villa wall, so sometimes Osama (the stray cat) lays along the top and silently judges you. This is the closest he will get to people; the height of the wall must make him feel secure. The other stray cat, Mogey, is friendly but prefers creature comforts inside over watching you launder.
After that, you transfer your clothes to the clothes line, which has almost but not quite enough clothespins, so you have to do a little shuffling of items. It’s pretty hot, so often it doesn’t take too long for the clothes to dry.
In other news, our kitchen is schizophrenic after having so many temporary guests use it over the months and years. There are jars and boxes everywhere and it is difficult to tell what belongs to a current resident, and what was abandoned by someone who is gone. A nice-enough but, apparently, rather inconsiderate resident who recently moved out left a bunch of partially-used spices, box mixes, and other items in “her” cupboard (we’ve all adopted a cupboard to store some of our personal items in). Since she’s gone now, I cleaned it out yesterday and found one moldy, desiccated onion, one sprouted onion, and one rotten, dripping onion on the top shelf. Do you know, rotten onions kind of smell like cat urine? So, I learned something yesterday. (Also, this resident failed to properly clean her room before leaving, which caused another rank odor to drift though the villa after she’d left. Her room was full of discarded clothing and trash).
In other other news, I tried a passion fruit today:
