There’s only one thing better than sharehouse living alongside a genuinely nice housemate: living with a housemate who is an endless source of blog post inspiration.
The latest chapter in this humorous saga involved our lovely friend Juan Diego the Mexican Landlord (JDTM), and a newly acquired washing machine built sometime in the 1970s by a teenager in his garage using nothing but lego.
We had noticed recently that the ferocity of the washing machine in our building was slowly destroying our clothes – they were coming out of the washes with soap stains, stretch marks and lint all over.
Our brave housemate, H, declared to us upon arriving back from work one evening that he would brave the terrors of the mechanical beast downstairs and test the “delicate” cycle to see if it was worth pursuing what was quickly becoming a very difficult relationship. We’d never heard of high-maintenance relationships with washing machines. Until arriving in Bogota, that is.
I came home to find Jane carefully explaining the situation to poor old H in Spanish, for the benefit of JDTM. You turn it on. You put it on delicate. It finishes. You take the tube out and put it in the sink. You let it drain. You spin it. You put it on again, with no soap. You let it finish. You drain it. You spin it. Y ya.
“So, one more time,” H begins. “In English this time?”
JDTM thinks this might possibly be the funniest thing he’s every heard a gringo say, and leaves in a fit of giggles.
30 minutes later, as we sit around our table in the dark, drinking beer (JDTM hasn’t yet managed to find the time to replace our now ex-light bulb above the dining table) Jane asks H, “So, have you…hung your clothes out yet?”
The blank, cranial flat-line look she receives says a little bit more than “errrr, no” or perhaps “shit this beer is strong”. H disappears down stairs for 10 minutes and returns, puffing.
“So, I’ve emptied the bag of shhhalt into the machine,” he begins. “And wiped lime around the lip. I’ve drunken de entire bottle of tequila….but the mashinth not workingk.”
Bless his cotton socks – mechanical literacy is not everyone’s cup of tea, it seems.
For the record, I came home from my 7am class the next morning to see H hanging his wet clothes up in his room. I suppose he decided to leave them in for an extra soak overnight.
