The importance of doing laundry...

... should never be underestimated. All these years, laundry has been such a simple thing for me. When I'm at home in Malaysia, all I have to do is put it in the laundry basket and it will appear in my cupboard, washed, folded and perfectly ironed where necessary. When I was at school, the laundry room was always just a flight of stairs away. In New York, things were a little harder because I had to walk three blocks to get my laundry done and making sure I had enough quarters was always a pain. But now that I'm in Seoul... doing my laundry is elevated to a whole new level of complicated.

The first thing my team and I had to do was find a laundromat because washing one shirt costs about $12 or something ridiculous like that in the hotel. Questioning the staff at the reception was particularly unhelpful. Staying at the Park Hyatt is great, but the staff just automatically assume that one is used to a certain level of luxury so anything you ask them to recommend will always be top quality and hence top dollar. In the case of laundry, no one at the reception could think of a laundromat that wasn't only "for locals", whatever that means. The staff at the entrance foyer pointed us to a laundromat that was about five blocks from the hotel, but the language barrier presented another problem. In the end, we had the hotel staff call the laundromat before we went and the laundry guy had to call the hotel when we got there in order to figure out what we wanted.


A day later, I have my laundry all washed and clean smelling. They even ironed my gym shirt! And everything is now in plastic bags. I had to walk back to the hotel with my computer on one shoulder, and two handfuls of shirts on hangers. What a pain! And it cost the three of us $147 to get two weeks' worth of laundry done. But the worst thing is, I have to leave for Taiwan in two days, so all those beautifully ironed shirts will have to be folded and stuffed into my luggage, and then I will have to unpack and iron them again. Sigh... if only I were at home again and I didn't have to worry about laundry.