I am running out of clean clothes, so today’s mission was to find a laundromat. The hotel does have a laundry service but someone who tried it didn’t have a good experience with it so I decide it would be easier to just do it myself.

I find a nice, clean laundromat, or laundrybar, as it’s called here, about a mile from the hotel. I’m the only one there, so no waiting. I figure out the conversions from dollars to liras to tokens to make sure I won’t be paying 50 bucks for clean underwear. I pop in my load and wait. Halfway through the wash cycle, the electricity goes out in the shop, and the washing machine grinds to a halt. It’s a front-loading washer with water in it, so it can’t be opened. I sit back and ponder my options. The electricity has to go back on sometime, right? I’m not abandoning my laundry here, I don’t have much clothing left at the hotel.

Two other people from our group arrive with their suitcases full of laundry. They are more resourceful (or less patient?) than I am, because they immediately start troubleshooting the situation. They go looking for a fuse box, Google-translate every sign in the shop for contact info, go to the shop next door for help. Nothing helps. The latch on my machine finally unlocks, I suspect because the water has drained out. Unlike me, who was prepared to spend the night here guarding my clothes until the electricity came back on, they’re inclined to look for another laundrybar, so I decide to join them. I pile all my soggy clothes into my backpack and we make a run for the next closest laundromat. En route, several helpful locals stop me to pantomime that my backpack is leaking. We finally find our way to another laundrybar, this one with a helpful elderly caretaker. She guides us through the process, with some interpreting help from a customer from Ghana.

As they say, all’s well that ends well. I now have clean clothes, and another adventure to blog about.