February 16, 2024

Rinse and Repeat

Week seven has been never ending talks about our GCIL projects with our teams and peers. Most of us are spending too much time at the UTC dorms this week designing, prototyping, and scrapping projects. Our final presentations and flights out of Bangalore only a few weeks away, I have started to wonder what I will miss most while back at home. I’m beginning to think handwashing my laundry every few days will be one of the parts of Bangalore life I miss most. Before coming to India, Julian assured us that laundry would be a simple and quick process. The promised amount of laundry being done was far more than I can muster in my apartment’s creepy crawly basement. So I packed light, very very light. After lost socks and weeks without returned laundry, hand washing my laundry became a weekly routine. The first night was a panicked 2ish am attempt with Phoebe to wash and dry our clothes before our 6 am bus to Srirangapatna. That night it didn’t exactly go our way but it was a cold unforgiving night on the UTC roof. After weeks of practice, I have it down to a system of soaking, forgetting, adding detergent, soaking, forgetting, rinsing, rinsing again, maybe forgetting, and finally hanging it on the roof. Most of my days in Bangalore start with me and Phoebe’s morning “Oh sh*t” around 8:28 am, then running down to blogs by 8:30 am. After a few hours of work or class, I’ll decide to start a load of laundry too late in the day for it to dry by the next morning. A few hours later, I’ll bolt up from the UTC couches with another “Oh sh*t,” this time for the first soak of my laundry. Waking Audrey up from her afternoon nap to borrow some detergent and settling back down. The process repeats a few times till I can hang my laundry on the roof and retire to my hammock for the night. The next day I check the roof again and again to check what’s dry and end up in the hammock a little more than I should. Back home in Seattle, my laundry day looks like searching my house for quarters, walking to the bank, waiting for the bank to open, walking through the rain with my laundry, the machine being broken, staring at the strange pile of mannequins in my basement, and finally collecting my laundry late at night and taking a nap in the warm blankets. I know in a few weeks while drifting off in my apartment, I will be wishing I was in my hammock on the UTC roof.

And for future GCIL students, you’re here for ten weeks, and the laundry will most definitely not always run smoothly. Bring extra t-shirts, underwear, a fun very impractical hat, and your favorite pair of jeans. A hammock, speaker, and fun light never hurts too.

By Nantahala