Little known facts about laundry

My flat came with some interesting domestic tools: one very long flexible hose attached to my shower. Six colorful 10-foot bamboo poles suspended in a pole rack on the ceiling. A broom with a 6 foot handle.

On the way to see my apartment for the first time, we had driven past several apartment buildings where laundry was hung outside on bamboo poles. From a distance, the laundry hanging outside looks like flags for some kind of festival. But up close, it just looks like laundry.

Having half a dozen drying poles in my flat made perfect sense. Every day (or every part of every day that is not raining) is laundry day, so I'd put them to good use. Anyway, I understood the bamboo poles were necessary, but why (since Singaporeans tend not to be very tall) would anyone need a REALLY long broom? And in a 4 foot by 4foot bathroom in a tiny apartment, why 15 feet of hose?

To prepare the roof for laundry, obviously.

Little known facts about laundry: unless the roof beneath it is clean, neither would the clothes I'd hung out to dry be very clean, since they were (barely, not even sometimes) suspended above the roof. That was clear the first time I tried to hang 30 or 40 pounds of dripping clothes out the kitchen window and it lapped up the dirt from the roof. Long handled broom puzzle solved: I've swept off used tissues, banana peels/leaves, other people's laundry (higher floors), plastic bags, and (yuck) one dead bird. That's when I realized why the hose--it reaches out the kitchen window to the roof. Really, stuff decays very quickly. Gotta get the bird gunk off of the roof before the laundry goes out.

A brand new, front-loading washer does a great job combined with nature's dryer (very environmentally friendly), air and a bamboo pole.
Almost every apartment has a series of six metal tubes embedded about a foot apart into the concrete outside, just beneath kitchen window. Each of the embedded tubes has a removable metal cap (furthest away), attached by a string or piece of wire (foreground). "Be sure to put those back every time," Bee warned when she showed me the caps, "Health Department gets after you if you don't...only takes three days to hatch mosquitos...get dengue fever..." I've had an irrational fear of dengue fever since I've known I was coming here. Laundry is serious business here, as the scolding for dripping laundry demonstrates.
Messing with the Health Department might get me caned or quarantined. And those tubes could obviously catch and keep water if uncapped, so it has taken no reminder for me to replace the caps drying poles come with.

A small plastic tool ends in a crook that helps coax the bamboo poles out of their ceiling rack. Specially designed clothespegs (not enough for each piece of laundry, but enough I figured) are big enough to span the girth of the bamboo pole. Plus, you can thread clothes onto poles, right through the sleeves of shirts, the straps of bras, the legs of panties...only a few things actually need pegs. It is really just a matter of loading the wet clothes on the pole, sticking the bamboo and hanging it out to dry.

Sounds easy.

Not necessarily.

Little known facts about laundry: putting 20 or 30 pounds of wet stuff on a thin stick, pushing the stick as far away from your body as you can (you have to get it out the window and past the end of the tube that secures it) and then having the dexterity to manoeuver it back towards you until it is seated securely into its holder isn't as easy as it might appear at first blush.

Singapore laundry must have its own spatial culture. People who learn to launder in Singapore probably have a knack for the kinesthetic ballet that the body needs to move and leverage itself to stay upright inside a building while finagling the laundry out. Lucky for me that I am decidedly NOT a waiflike guest worker. Otherwise, on Day 1, I'd have been out of that window like a shot. The windowsill is a fulcrum of sorts and wet clothes a dandy counterweight...well, you get the picture.

Once I got past the false start of hanging wet clothes above a dirty roof I thought I had clear sailing...until I got the pole full of wet clothes out the window a second time only to realize I'd not yet removed the cap from the tube that secures the pole. Holding onto a pole full of wet laundry is NOT a single-handed job (an insight I should have remembered), so the pole gets hauled back into the kitchen, cap removed, and out it goes again. Success! I finally had an entire bamboo pole full of laundry hanging outside, securely attached to the building by its tube.
That's when the air started moving, helpfully I presumed. Kid memories floated back of my mom as she took clothes out of the basket and pinned them to the line. She would comment "it's a (not very) good drying day," depending on her calculus of the quality of the sun and wind and humidity. And of course, she was talking about cold Canadian air applied to her clotheslines full of laundry, not the turgid climate of Singapore.

Even when it is moving, you can't really call hot air here a breeze. Breeze implies something cool and refreshing. Here, it is just hot air that moves, even if sometimes it moves quite a lot. And it did move a lot that first laundry day.

Little know facts about laundry: Panties, confronted with air moving at great enough velocity, puff up. After ballooning considerably (especially if not secured due to shortage of clothespegs) they can move of their own volition. Despite being threaded onto a pole, if panties happen to be simultaneously (a) at the wrong end, (b) unsecured, and (c) full of hot air, they can animate so vigorously that they fly off their bamboo pole at a pretty good rate of knots, sometimes even ending up on the far side of the parking lot. I know this. I've seen it happen.

Good thing I packed extra panties. I haven't lost any clothes since.

Drying bed linens, even after I got the knack of most other stuff, remained problematic. The poles weren't quite high enough to suspend sheets fully above the roof. Despite hosing and sweeping, I didn't love wet sheets sliding over the red roof below. What to do? I decided that spreading the queen sized duvet cover across two poles, about an arms length apart, would take up enough slack to eliminate drag. Good concept, even if not such great execution.

You may have seen this coming, I did not. Now, instead of the tricky manoeuver of hanging 20 pounds of wet clothes out a window on stick gripped tightly in both hands, I would instead attempt hanging 40 pounds of unweildy wet sheets spread over two sticks, one in each hand. Picture me, bride of Frakenstein-like, lurching towards the open kitchen window, bamboo poles wobbling and arms akimbo, quivering from the weight and effort of keeping the sheets off the floor...

I only got the damn poles half way out the window, before I lost control and got stuck. Couldn't get them in, couldn't get them out. If I let go of the poles, I worried that the sheets would sail off into the parking lot aka panty heaven. So there I was, for an eternity (okay, only a minute or two) kind of stuck but mostly paralyzed by laughing so hard I just couldn't go forwards or backwards. Tears were rolling down my cheeks, inspired by my situation...my attire (bra and panties, it was hot), attitude (stuck in a window) and audience (South Asian construction workers at the site next door might have been able to see, and for sure the taxi driver in the parking lot right across from my window could, watching in amazement). I was just ever so slightly hysterical.

Little known facts about laundry: From the Singapore New paper (that's right, not newspaper but New paper): [a] foreign domestic worker fell from the fourth storey while hanging out the laundry on Tuesday. Okay, take domestic and fourth storey out of that news clip, and put in second floor, and that laundry misdadventure could have been mine.

I finally managed to haul the wet sheets back into the kitchen and found a bathrobe. I next googled maid services in Singapore. I had no business doing laundry, I'd kill myself sooner or later...I needed someone competent to help. Experience was teaching me that I could savor a full-bodied, authentic Singapore experience without having to do every single solitary thing that a person MIGHT do here. I figured laundry's not in my job description, I probably wasn't covered by worker's comp for self-inflicted laundry injuries. Even more worrying: would the University's liability insurance cover me if I inadvertently maimed or injured an unsuspecting neighbor with bamboo poles and wet cloth...or airborne panties? Best to leave laundry to the pros, before someone got hurt.

Little known facts about laundry (according to an American who has lived here for years): the leading cause of death for foreign workers in Singapore is falling out of apartment windows while putting out laundry. I'll grant you, most foreign workers are domestic workers, not professors. Still, I have decided that doing laundry in Singapore could be the tropical equivalent of fishing in Alaska--the deadliest catch might just be trying to catch one's balance while holding a pole full of wet laundry.