I’m thinking about underwear. I skyped with my 23-year-old niece
yesterday. She just landed in Amman for an internship with ACTED, a French NGO,
and had the day to herself before starting work. She said she had to do laundry because she is running out of clean
underwear. Now, I just returned from a 35-day trip to Nepal and India and I
washed out my undies every night. I often do this at home too, thereby preserving the
color, lengthening the life span, and possibly preventing shrink. Where did I
learn to do thus, from whom? Probably from traveling as a kid with my family,
from my mother. It must be a TCK thing.
I suggested to Hillary that she wash them out herself, just
use soap, don’t worry about having proper detergent, it still works, that bar
of generic soap in a hotel room, and when she gets settled in one spot she can figure
the laundry thing out.
Thinking to myself that I would still wash out my own underwear - to have to go to the
laundry for the sake of little things, no.
I am curious about how many women do wash out their own
under garments, at least while traveling. I just never know the norm, sometimes
I think less so than others, but perhaps many feel like this, or else they just
don’t think about it. My husband
recently told me he often did not know what was in my head. Well, it’s
not that deep.
The underwear - it’s
way better to wash a pair each night so they don’t pile up and then I have to
hang them over the shower curtain and the back of chairs and on window latches
and, if they aren’t dry in the morning, whoever comes to fix up the room will
be faced with flags of panties and contemplate them in some way. How could they
not? Even finger them to feel the material, think about her own underpants, and look at this one, a little dingy, even
a small tear in a waistband.
A travel writer bragged that she went around the world on 1
pair of undies. This seems very risky to me. I understand that the article’s
point was how little one can pack for a big trip, but still. Anything can
happen, accidents of liquid from within or without. Spills and leaks. My
brother making me laugh so hard on car trips and there hadn’t been a rest stop
for 6 hours, that kind of thing.
More likely though it’s those squat toilets, or balancing
behind a thin bush hoping the other bus passengers are not watching your shiny
white ass. Haste interferes with
accuracy. Sometimes the stream is just
not straight. I never could figure out why. Volume same, direction askew. Or,
it’s the last chance to urinate for miles and miles and you force out all the
dribbles. Look up dribble in the dictionary. Take my word for it, you need a
spare.
How much room or weight does one pair of medium-sized
underpants take? This is not the point because I am not that travel writer on
the cutting edge of packing light. I am a normal, mostly, female traveling in a
foreign or not-so-foreign country always with a back-up pair of panties.
‘Course the other trick is the panty liner-a recent discovery of
mine, why it took so long, I don’t know. The prospect of paperless toilet
stalls prompted this. Yes, I have Charmin tissue in a neat little package in my
pocketbook, but do you think I always remember to grab it? Having a weighty bag
swinging over my shoulder is not helpful in most bathroom scenes, and wet
floors from that curious spray nozzle and heaven knows what else are not conducive to
setting my bag down. Hence, my bag sits in the car with my husband or goes over
his shoulder while I find the Memsahibs. (Maybe I need to rethink a handbag aka backpack.) Anyway, the little neat strip of extra
protection works great, and when you rip it off, voila, clean panties. So, I’m
betting that travel writer had some of those along, just to cover her butt.
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