Observations Made While Doing Laundry:

-- Morocco is dry. I mean, I don’t live in the desert and there are no sand dunes outside my door, but Morocco is dry. It’s rained three times this year, and this is the rainy season. There’s a fine layer of dust over everything in my life, including me, and my skin is so dry it burns when I put lotion on, but I didn’t realize just how dry it is until I pulled my sodden, soaking wet jeans out of a bucket of water, hung them on the line without bothering to wring them out, and they were completely dry three hours later.

-- Doing laundry by moonlight is not as interesting or fun as it sounds.

-- So, when you do laundry in a bucket, it takes for-freaking-ever for your clothes to be really clean. Rinse after rinse after rinse, and the water is still a dingy grey. I don’t actually know how long it takes for the water to run clean because I’ve never had the patience to find out. Usually I call it a day when the water is no longer sudsy, but there’s always a moment when I look at the grayish water my clothes are soaking in and think to myself, “That’s really gross. You should keep washing.” Turns out, it’s much easier to ignore that moment that when it’s 11:30 and I’m tired.

-- Because I am a crazy person, I like my socks to match when they’re hanging up to dry, but this time when I was hanging my socks up, I ended up with 5 mismatched pairs. I searched my bedroom and dirty clothes basket in vain until I checked the bottom of my sleeping bag and found all the lost socks, plus another complete set. I always wear socks to bed because it is cold, but then my feet get warm and I end up toeing my socks off in the middle of the night and forget to empty out my sleeping bag. Still, that’s a whole lot of socks in my sleeping bag.

--Man, I really do not own non-crazy Korean socks. Makes me nostalgic for weekends in Seoul when I would inevitable come home with at least one pair of new socks that were meant for a nine year old.


-- Dear God, I just wrote 400 words about doing laundry. The exciting lives of Peace Corps Volunteers!