It's not unusual to walk into a friend's studio apartment in Korea to find damp undies and bras strewn across her bedroom, dripping pants from the kitchen table or socks and sweaters hanging from a multi-tiered drying rack. She will, however, excuse her mess with two simple words and a shrug: laundry day. And because you don't have a dryer either, no further explanation is needed to account for the plethora of skivvies dangling in front if your eyes while you toast to the good life with a Soju and sprite cocktail.
It's Laundry day: you have two options: morning wash or night wash. The morning--you wash your clothes before work and hang them around the room to dry, ideally, before nightfall. Nighttime--you wash them whilst at dinner (because you and cooking devices don't mix) and hang to dry overnight. Essentially you better have your clothes picked out and lined up a few days before you intend to wear them because there's no quick wash 'n dry process possible here. Do you really want to wait for those jeans to dry or can you wear them, dirty and wrinkled, one last Friday night before they start to really reek of Soju and BBQ pork?
My challenge to you then is to do a full load--I'm talking stuffed-to-the-brim--of laundry. Set up a line outside or, to avoid judgment by your neighbors, use your counters or kitchen chairs and let evaporation do the work. It's a chore that under normal circumstances (i.e. owning a dryer) is already tedious enough but will transport you across the globe, where others live day in and day out without this luxury.
See you in 12 hours when your clothes are, hopefully, air dry.
xx
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