Tbilisi Laundry Ban
I'm copy-editing The Georgian Times. It's Sunday morning. I'm still in my pajamas, but I would like to bring the following article to your attention:
Tbilisi residents prohibited from hanging laundry on balconies
Tbilisi residents who hang laundry out on balconies overlooking central streets will now face a $285 fine, the Tbilisi city hall told the Novosti Georgia agency on Friday.
A law to that effect came into force February 15.
Fines must be paid within 20 days, and will be tripled for repeat violations. Tbilisi's city hall said it will distribute drying boards to poor families whose balconies overlook central streets. All others will have to pay for their own.
Guys, I make $250 a month, and that is decent chunk of change here. It lets us pay our electricity, gas, and water bills, with a lot left over for bottles of wine and dinners out.
People who dry their laundry on their balconies don't have driers. (Heck, we don't have one either). Clothes take a long time to dry indoors away from the light and the stir of air outdoors. I've been kind of happy about the downtown beautification project -- many of the old buildings are having their rotting facades re-plastered, and it's nice to see this pretty city get off its knees and apply some fresh makeup or whatever. But barring people from using what's theirs to do something as necessary as drying their laundry - purely in the interest of what? making passers-by forget that there are people without driers in the world? - seems petty and ridiculous.
And just what the heck is a drying board, anyway?
5 comments:
I've been doing some research on traditional kimono laundering. A drying board in that context (and also in papermaking) is a wooden board that you stretch a length of fabric out on, while it's wet. It keeps the fabric flat, and makes for even shrinkage. See Japan in the Bakumatsu-Meiji period.
Link for a picture:
http://sepia.lb.nagasaki-u.ac.jp/en/target.php?id=2379
Hmmm -- interesting. It would be surprising, but very interesting, were the Georgian government to distribute the same kinds of drying boards as were used in Japan during the Meiji period. Are these in use elsewhere/elsewhen, too?
Not sure. The boards are a pretty good idea - they take up very little space, no electricity, cheap to give out to people...
not that I'm condoning what your city's doing.
These boards go way back in Japan. I've also seen current photos of Japanese grandmas washing kimono and spreading them on the boards to dry. Keep in mind: Japanese lack of living space, and respect for tradition.
Using drying boards is a simple enough idea, that any culture that dries great lengths of fabric might have used it. As you saw in the link, the Japanese used to take apart kimono, sew them back into the original bolt of fabric (traditional kimono is made from one 9-yd, 12" wide bolt of fabric) and wash them that way.
I'd be interested in hearing about other cultures using boards, if you did find out. Try a search for "drying board" in Google.
Have you ever heard of clothes horses. People who hang their dirty washing off a piece of string are simply dirty and drip drying their dirty germs over the heads of other people. Nobody wants to see these dirty looking rags hanging high in the sky, it is squallor and deprivation
Wow, you have very strange ideas. How is laundry line any dirtier than a clothes horse?
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