Six weeks in a foreign land can be fun, exciting, challenging and dirty.  Yes, I said dirty.  Not because the country is dirty or the things we are doing are filthy, but rather because there is no way that any of us could pack enough clothes for six weeks.  When I faced the task of packing, I wondered how much I could jam into one suitcase, hoping that somehow I could cram and caress and jam and prod six weeks worth of t-shirts, shorts, slacks and underwear, along with a variety of personal care products into one suitcase; at least one suitcase that I could still carry and get to the airport.  Of course I couldn’t and I was left with the decision of just how much to bring. One week, that was the decision that I made.  One week’s worth of clothes, some of which I could wear more than once without offending my traveling partners.  I figured that gave me a week and a half before I would have to handle laundry.   But little did we know that laundry day would be, in a way, something we looked forward too. We’ve purchased laundry detergent and have learned to launder clothes both in the sink and if we have a big load, in the bathtub.  Washing, soaking and rinsing those three are no problem. I’m not sure if it’s more about the idea of having clean clothes to wear, or the clean smell of the laundered clothes.  I caught my roomie Sarah, on the day she did her laundry, smelling it, enjoying the clean smell of the items.

The only problem we have when doing laundry is trying to get the clothes to dry.  Our hotel rooms in Shanghai really didn’t have any air conditioning, so we left our windows open.  Because of that, our rooms would sometimes be humid and that humidity made it very difficult when trying to get clothes to dry.  Slacks sometimes would take two days, shirts at least a day and even underwear was tough to get dry.  Fortunately Jack came up with a solution.  He tied several shoestrings together and viola’, a clothesline.  While it made drying clothes easier it wasn’t always quicker.

No matter the problems, laundry day has become a welcome event.  And now that we’ve arrived in Beijing and actually have air conditioning in our rooms, I think drying won’t even be a problem.