A laundry fiasco

Trip Start May 06, 2007

101

166

Trip End Jul 24, 2008

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Flag of Macedonia Skopje, Macedonia
Friday, December 21, 2007

After walking around Skopje for about two hours, I had seen just about everything I wanted to see. Old Bazaar area was nice - it's now filled with modern shops for the locals instead of tourist crap like in Sarajevo. I also visited an old Turkish bathhouse that was turned into the Modern Art Museum. It was a beautiful building, but none of the artwork was all that interesting to me. The Christmas tree in the center square was really pretty - the lights on it sparkled. Otherwise, there wasn't too much to see. And it was really cold out. Good thing I only planned one day here.

That evening I decided to do laundry since the hostel actually had a dryer, a rarity in these parts. It had been a while since I'd been anywhere long enough to have time for my clothes to dry, so this was a much needed cleaning. About 5 minutes after my clothes had been moved from the washer to the dryer, the power went out. Macedonia doesn't have regular power outages like Albania, so this wasn't expected by anyone. The girl working at the hostel was new and didn't even know if they had any candles around, so she had to call the owner to get him to come over and help figure it all out. He said he didn't know of any other dryers in town where I could bring my clothes. So my only option was drying them in front of the wood-burning stove that served as a heater to the hostel kitchen and common room. Oh, and one more thing to mention - if my clothes weren't dry by 7am, they would need to go into my bag wet to travel with me to Sofia, Bulgaria since I had already bought my bus ticket.

While I was getting my clothes laid out on various chairs in front of the stove, the owner decided to invite his friends to come hang out at the hostel since he couldn't go anywhere. To them, hanging out meant chain-smoking. I really did not want my clothes to stink of smoke, especially after they were just washed, so I ended up in an argument with the hostel owner about opening a window/door and closing the sliding plastic curtain between the kitchen area and the sitting area. He said that it was too cold for his friends to sit there with the window open and that they needed the curtain open to get the heat from the stove. After a lot of yelling from both sides and crying from mine, I won round one of the argument. Then about an hour later he started yelling at me again. We went back and forth like this many times until his friends finally told him to just stop it already and let me keep the curtain closed. Finally, at 1am, after about 4 hours without power, the power returned and I was able to put my still mostly wet clothes into the dryer. I managed to get about 4 hours of sleep before I had to wake up to catch my bus. Not exactly a fun experience, but at least I had clean clothes.