But there is one noticeably absent topic. It was actually the first topic I'd searched for in the index but when I couldn't find it, I was hardly surprised. It was the one big adjustment I felt that I made moving here, so the fact it wasn't covered in the book suggests to me that other readers have found it similarly traumatic. That topic, dear readers, is laundry.
Now don't think I'm being hyperbolic here, and I'm in no way a princess, but doing laundry in New York can drag you kicking and screaming out of your comfort zone.
When I'm back at home in Australia, I love doing laundry. I find it therapeutic to clean the clothes that I have so carefully purchased and have enjoyed wearing. And given that most of us in Australia have washing machines in our homes, and clotheslines in our backyards, there is something wonderful about leaving clothes to air-dry in the warm southern hemisphere sunshine. To me, there is nothing like the smell of clean clothes, fresh off the line. Clothes seem softer and towels are fluffier somehow.
Here in New York, you count yourself among the city's elite if you have a washer/dryer in your apartment - hell, if it's even in your building somewhere (like the basement), you're as rich as Rockefeller. For the rest of us, doing laundry either means lugging a huge bag to the coin-operated laundromat around the corner, or dropping your dirty clothes off to be cleaned and pick them up later - or have them delivered.
And in that Plan B lies the trauma. You give your dirty clothes to a stranger and they wash them for you. Everything - dirty tshirts, dirty gym clothes, dirty underpants. And when I moved here, that idea was tantamount to just handing my clothes to some random person on the subway. I just didn't feel right doing it.
If you're anything like me, you start out thinking that you'll just send your large items out to be washed by the stranger at the drycleaners - towels and sheets, things you couldn't be bothered fluffing and folding for yourself. And for the first month or so, you drag yourself and your dirty clothes to the coin-operated laundromat, feeding rolls of quarters (25 cents) into the machines. You read a magazine while your clothes sit and spin, and you feel pretty good about yourself.
But then you realise that the industrial washers are brutal on your clothes. The whites never stay white for long, and the dryers simultaneously stretch your tshirts and shrink your gym pants. And not only that, you realise you're spending hours of your precious Saturday inside a steamy, seedy laundromat. You start to question if this is really what you moved to New York City to do.
And so you toughen up. You learn to accept that you have no idea who works in the laundromat across the street, but you assume that every one of them has handled your underpants several times. And you realise that whatever happens to you in New York, your underpants will never be the weirdest thing this City has seen or handled.
