So I've lived in LA for almost four months now. Since moving, I've had two residences, five roommates, one internship, one wrecked car, one and a half house parties, one near-arrest, and zero jobs. All in all, not too bad. I've also learned new skills. Since our "new" house in Van Nuys, CA came fully-equipped with a broken dryer, I have made numerous trips to some of the many "Lavandarias" in our neighborhood. Somehow I've never gone to the same one twice, and these gringo-friendly laundromats can be surprisingly complicated. Don't be fooled by the simple "Coin Laundry" signs outside. The mechanism by which one causes the laundry machines to function has been different every time. Sometimes it's load-then-pay, others it's pay-then-load. Some places have coin slots in every machine, other require you to buy a rechargeagble card. Some dryer doors lock by pushing and turning to the right, others require the customer to use the majority of his or her body weight to keep the door closed for the duration of use. Veterans use a propped chair and go about their business.
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| (None of them are this nice in my hood) |
These shared laundry facilities are not entirely unpredictable though. All of them have included the following: cute little kids sprinting up and down the rows of washers yelling in Spanish, a single-player Cruisin' USA arcade game (yes, the awesome kind you remember from childhood trips to the grocery store), and most thankfully, kindhearted four and a half foot Mexican women who first laugh but inevitably take pity on the white, privileged, college-educated goober who can't figure out how these mystical cloth-washing machines operate. Breaking cultural and lingual barriers, these God-sends just smile at me and then demonstrate with amazing force the proper way to slam a dryer shut or snap the handle release on the door to allow me to retrieve my clothes.
After weeks of training, I finally ventured to the Lavandaria with confidence this weekend. It went down something like this:
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