Laundry: A Whole New Adventure

I tell ya, the one thing that Korea has over New York is the fact that I have laundry facilities IN my actual apartment, as opposed to schlepping 3 loads a block and a half away in most of the elements. AND one thing it has over my college apartment is that it isn't coin operated. I feel like an actual adult being able to just stay in and clean my dirty laundry and ya know, just watch tv or something.

However, there is a catch (there's always a catch). While I do have laundry capabilties here, it is not as most of you know it. You'd think you'd wash your clothes in a washing machine and then once done you would then proceed to dry them in dryer, correct? Wrong. Koreans don't necessarily believe that you should waste the energy/electricity in doing something nature will do for you over time. Therefore, I have a gigantic washer, BUT no dryer. Instead, I have this handy dandy little drying rack. And its not some cheap stand up wooden thing, its this straight up, huge elongated metal rack that has different areas for different things, and can be folded into various positions for say things like Blankets & Sheets.



Most Koreans I've noticed have their apartments set up in such a way that the front of their living space isn't a living room overlooking something, or even bedrooms with windows, but a separate laundry room specifically for hanging and drying clothes. It's a rather large walk in closet with very big windows overlooking the streets where you hang all of your unmentionables for everyone to see as they walk by outside. I unfortunately (or fortunately) do not have one of these. I have a balcony that is about a foot deep and six feet wide, so I must use the rack inside my apartment.

Nothing was more interesting that the first time I actually went to do laundry and it was all in Hangul (korean script). It is all digital, and the pictures KIND OF make sense, but everytime I throw my clothes in the machine, I sit and wonder what the outcome is gonna be. Makes it exciting, to say the least. OH, and my washer is bigger than my refrigerator - that's amusing too (you can kind of see it on the right:).