Trying to Do Laundry

Yesterday, July 12th, was largely consumed in my quest to do some mundane chores.

One of the lame things about moving is that you must reinvent the wheel every time: that is, you must figure out from scratch how to do everything (shop, pay bills, transport yourself, complete paperwork) and where everything is. When you move to a different country, this process becomes even more complicated, and there are always little surprises (like that in Japan, you pay all your bills at 7-11, including your visa fees to the government; or that in China, you must register with the police when you move into an apartment).

So far the move to Singapore has been pretty seamless. But laundry presented an issue. Since we've been here almost a week (and B goes through clothes at an enormous rate, as does little R), I had a bunch to do. Unfortunately, the hotel charges like $5-10 per item. There are very few laundromats here for some reason (there was a laundry at the nearby mall but they also charged several dollars per item), so I had to travel 5 MRT stops away to a laundry located in public housing (next to the main Sikh temple, actually). Even though it was a laundromat with coin-operated machines, it was not self-service (the employee washed, dried and folded everything). However, it was only $10 for everything, so the price was the same as if I had done it myself in San Francisco (it was $4 per full cycle for us there).

Once we get an apartment, this will be a non-issue as we will have our own washer/dryer (very luxurious as we haven't had that before). I am glad about that because hauling all the laundry plus a stroller and baby for half an hour each way was hot and not very fun.