Laundry. It is a necessary thing to do from time to time. The home we are at does not have a washer. I mention only the washer because of the fact that most hang clothes out to dry. Both energy efficient and also inexpensive.
To do our laundry (if one is unwilling to do the laundry by hand) the clothes are loaded into bags and we drive down to the laundry mat. This is a small building with 5 washers and 3 dryers. You can either leave your laundry there and come back to pickup cleaned and folded laundry or can stay there and do the standard wait thing. Amazingly the temperature in this building doesn't change. It was 80 when we started and still 80 two hours later.
Because of the amount of humidity here it takes longer to dry clothes in a dryer. So some we ended up having to come back for.
Other necesary things that one needs to learn quickly is how to park. This is not something that the Europeans seem to have learned. There are a swarm of motorcycles in this country and especially in this town. The town is divided into a figure 8 with each side being a one way street. The one way rule seems to go out the window when it gets dark as you will frequently have a motorcycle coming at you when you are not expecting it.
So as a car driving down the street you are at any given time surrounded by 2-6 motorcycles. Reminds me of the sharks with their cleaner fish. Every move you make the motos make with you. Although often the motos are trying to squeeze past on the right or left. Often you have to dodge vehicles that are parked on the side of the already too narrow road or the vehicles coming onto the road from drives that invariably scrape bottom on most vehicles due to the odd grade that has to allow for the drainage of water from torrential down pours. Driving here is a 100% attention absorbing task. There is no "Hey, look at that!" as you watch front, back and sides.
Back to the parking thing. We were pulling into a parking spot for the laundry mat. A SUV pulled over and decided to parallel park. I honked my horn, honked again put the car into reverse and checked my rear and saw a moto, laid on the horn and...still got hit.
A little dent. The driver a french doctor that has a house here in L.T. and also in Santo Domingo. Got his info and have to call a claim in. Later in the day I was sitting and waiting for a ride and saw another vehicle attempt the parallel parking thing and nearly cause a 5 car/moto pile up. I waited to see if the driver would be european and sure enough. So the lesson when you come here and drive...DON'T TRY TO PARALLEL PARK!
The doctor took it all in stride as these things commonly occur. Our rental is a 2008 but like people here look much older than it is. We got to talking about trading his services for the repair as Jenny has a sinus infection, another sister a bladder infection, another a hernia, we all have bug bites gallor, I have a rash from the sun. We are changing colors rapidly. Most of us are a red hue, Adam is nearly black and Kerri is a beautiful Indian red/brown.
Today some go to construction and some to preaching. The congo is starting their tract campaign. TTFN! lj
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