A New Team

Well, I moved to a new hostel today. I don't know why I booked two different hostels in Beijing...I just wanted to see if there were any better amenities that I was missing out on, have some point of reference, etc.

The last hostel was fairly nice. The rooms were super quiet, and there were some nice common spaces. The solitude in the rooms was quite a change from the conviviality of the rooms in the Australian hostels. As a matter of fact, the light was almost never on in the room. Everybody kept to themselves, and I never even met my roommates. The beds were all shrouded with privacy curtains that were always closed. The staff was nice and helpful; I could have stayed there, but I just wanted to experience something different.

At the new place, it's quiet also, but at least I've met some of my suitemates on the first day. The rooms are a little cheaper, but almost everything else is a little more expensive. Including laundry.

I had been waiting to do a load of laundry until I got to China, because it was so expensive in Australia. But it turns out that laundry is even more expensive in China, because they don't have laundry machines, but, rather, they send laundry out to a service. So I decided to just do laundry in the sink, as I have been doing.

All throughout Australia, I alternated between two sets of clothes, team blue shirt, and team gray shirt. I would either wash one in the sink and change into the other, or wash one and put it on damp and let it dry on my body. But, as I was leaving Australia, I neglected to wash team blue shirt in the sink, so I lugged it along with me as dirty laundry. So, now, when team gray shirt got dirty, I had to wash two sets of clothes in the sink. Now I had to turn to team dark blue shirt. It's the first time that I had to use a third set of clothes.

So I washed the two sets of clothes in the sink, and used my bungee cord clothesline for the first time. It is hanging diagonally over my bottom bunk (yay, I got a bottom bunk!) right now as I type this and the clothes are almost dry.

Before, with just one set of clothes, I could just hang them on the slats of the bed. But two sets are just too much to do that with. So I strung up the clothesline.

That is all probably much more detail and minutia than you care about regarding my laundry, and it's not as exciting as The Great Wall of China or anything, but, hey, it's my deal.