Saying Bye

To be dramatic - the end of the first month saw an end of an era! Everyone who was in Lion House when I arrived have gone!

Tammy and Gigi, two amazing girls from Hong Kong (which looks so so beautiful so I think that I will just have to go visit some day!) had shared a room with Hana and I but they both left after 2 weeks.

My first set of roomates! Hana from Republic of Ireland, Tammy, Me, Gigi

Georgina, who I flew out with, and Hana, who arrived the same day, both left after a month. It was very strange for Jenn and I to say bye to them when we had all arrived together. That weekend Jenn and I decided to take it easy and save some pennies by just spending the weekend in Lion House. So on Friday evening after Georgina and Hana left it meant that it was just Jenn and I in the house, both sleeping in separate rooms. The house seemed ominously empty!

We spent the weekend getting laundry done. Which is harder than it sounds!! We have shallow-ish, wide buckets which we fill up with water and mix with regular clothes washing-powder that we buy from the amazing wee supermarket in town called Food City. So we mix the (cold) water to get all soapy and then we put our laundry in there. Let it soak. Scrub it. Scrub it some more. Accept it's never to get properly clean. Empty the water and rinse the laundry out in clean water. Leave it to soak. Rinse it out again. Wring it out as much as possible (not easy when you have dodgy wrist/hand joints like me!) and then hang it out to dry. On a wee balcony there are 3 wooden clothes horses, which run the risk of leaving stains on your clothing, anything light or white a no-go for the clothes horses! There are also a few clothes lines between two pillars on the balcony. Upside of the balcony is that there is a roof over it, so the rain wont drench your drying laundry. Downside is because of it being so humid hanging clothes out there can take anything between 2-4 days to dry properly! The other option is to hang your laundry on the washing lines on the roof to dry. To clarify I dont mean a washing line like at home, I just mean a line of rope (its not rope, dunno what to call it!) in a straight line. If you accept the fact that a monkey might steal your clothes, they might get blown off the line and nibbled by a rat, they might end up smelling if any of the smokers have a cigarette on the roof, and if it rains then your stuff will end up wetter than it was when you hung it out - then the roof is the better option as laundry will usually be dry within a day, providing that you put it out before midday and so the direct sun will have dried it by the time it gets dark at 6ish.
So Jenn and I caught up on the joys of laundry. And then we did our own thing like read or write blog posts etc.

On Saturday new folk arrived at our house too, so we were there to greet them which was nice. But on Sunday they were doing orientation so we went through to Hikkadua to sunbathe. It was quite a dull, cloudy day and we only lay out for about half an hour - yet we still ended up bright red! That evening when Nalaka came back he took one look at me and shouted from across the room 'Oh my gosh Claire what happened to your face!' which promptly caused Jenn to cry with laughter. We spent the second half of the afternoon watching Princess Diaries!!

Overall it was a nice weekend!