Traveling the World

Having lived in the USA for most of my life, I became used to the idea of an indoor washer and dryer for cleaning clothes. Living in Austria wasn’t tough for me because my host mother insisted on doing the laundry, which was dried on a line outside! In Israel, we had enough clothes that we didn’t have to clean them at all! In China though, almost no one has a dryer like in the states. They exist, but they cost way too much money, more than two months average salary for a Chinese person.

As is life, we must adjust to the home environment, and that meant using a drying line in my room to clean my clothes. Because I have a washing machine like almost everyone else in my city, I didn’t have to resort to the old style of taking the sheets down to the river and beating them with a paddle like this woman! Fenghuang is still very traditional, and that means using the river to clean the sheets and clothing. It’s something I would hate having to do, but to see how much it sucked, I asked this woman to let me try it for myself.

She said, “sure, why not,” except it began to look as if it were going to rain kittens and puppies, and she almost yelled at me to hurry up and give her back her paddle because she needed to finish in time to get back to her house. It was a fun experience, but only because it’s not my reality!