The fat lady across the street

In my last entry, I talked of how things here are inexpensive, because there are no tourists. One exception is the laundry shop directly across from our school.
A fat, young lady, with puffy cheeks as red as beets and eyes with dollar signs on them, sits in the shop waiting for us foreign teachers to bring our laundry to her. She wants to charge us 20 yuan for a grocery bag of clothes, and 25 yuan if the bag is actually full. Yes, I said "grocery bag." Then she wants to charge extra for pants, and any pieces of clothing she deems, heavy?

She takes your dirty laundry out piece-by-piece to inspect whether she can charge you more, while you're standing there, probably with your face as red as hers, because she's about to get to the dirty underwear you laid on the bottom. Luckily, she usually stops at the underwear. What irritates me most is how she takes her sweet time going through my clothes, then tells me that it's a very big bag. Darn it, I only have 2 pair of pants, 2 to 3 shirts, and a couple of underwear and socks. How much clothes can I put in a grocery bag anyway?

For comparison sake, a laborer here probably makes only 30 yuan a day. If the fat lady charges 20 yuan to wash a bag of clothes, who in Haimen City can afford it? Exactly, she can only prey on the foreigners like us with money to spare. We learned of this place from the manager of the training center, an American Chinese who speaks fluent Putonghua. She's a regular customer of the shop, and each time, she stuffs her bag full of clothes and gets charged 10 yuan, flat. Obviously, the fat lady doesn't treat everyone as equal. Oh, another thing, because the shop doesn't have a dryer, we can't pick up our clothes on the same day, or the next; it totally depends on the weather. And since it's the rainy season here, I have to wait two days for my clothes, and even when I get them, they have a stuffiness smell to them, not pleasant at all. I guess that's the price we have to pay when we're too lazy to wash our own clothes.

Filed Sat - May 15, 2004, 07:08 PM in

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