I'm just glad it's not all by hand

This may not be the most exciting post ever, but it is a little slice of our daily lives here in Tianjin. Washing clothes in our apartment is a bit more of an involved process than it is back home. Yesterday was the first time I felt like I had really mastered the whole process, which for me meant that I completed the task without dumping water all over the bathroom floor.

Allow me to demonstrate:

First the washing tub of the machine has to be filled with water. This is done semi-manually. I don't have to carry buckets of water in from the village well or anything, but I do have to turn on the water faucet and keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't overfill, or that the hose doesn't come loose and spray water all over the place.

Then add soap, turn the dial, and wait for the first cycle to run through. That's no problem.

Next, you have to drain the tub. This is where it starts to get tricky. The first couple of times I did this, I managed to get water all over the bathroom floor. You see, most drainpipes in China are not so good at the drainage (don't ask me why, or how, exactly--I'm not sure; I just know that, in my experience, they often don't drain so well). So, if the draining hose of the machine is placed directly into the drain in the floor, there will be water everywhere.

The solution is to drain the water into a bucket. But keep an eye on that. Because the tub holds more water than the bucket can. Also, the last bit of water in the hose won't really drain into the bucket, because it's kind of uphill climb, so you must very carefully transfer the hose from the bucket to the drain in the floor, hoping not to dump out water in the process.

The next stage is to re-fill the tub for a rinse cycle, and then to drain the tub again when the cycle is through. This whole process is pretty much a repeat of everything above. So, again, here are several points when the probability of spraying or dumping water all over the floor is pretty darn high.

After the rinse cycle, you manually transfer the clothes over to the spin-tub part of the machine, and run them through a spin cycle to get all the excess water out. Again, this is another step during which there is a high probability of dumping the spun-out water on the floor, so it is another replay of the bucket/drain process described above.

From here, it's all pretty easy: remove clothes, shake out the wrinkles as best you can, and hang them up to dry.

I've managed to make some pretty massive messes in my attempts to perfect this process. In fact, right after I completed a load in which I dumped almost no water, and I felt like I had become an expert, I did another load of laundry in which absolutely everything that could have gone wrong, did. I dumped water on the floor while draining soapy water. I forgot to set the tub from "drain" back to "normal," so when I re-filled it, I was actually dumping water everywhere...the list of mishaps goes on and on.

It's a good thing we bought a mop and bucket on our first trip to Carrefour.