The Laundromat

So...a couple weeks ago -- the 13th -- I went to go do laundry. I'd been here nearly a month, and it was about time I did some laundry. I gather up my stuff, stick it in a bag, get some detergent and walk down the stairs and up the street to the laundromat. When I get there, I see this guy sitting in a chair in the doorway. Now, if I had been in the States, this might not have been so surprising. But, in France this man looked TOTALLY out of place. This man, for all intents and purposes, looked like the typical overweight American redneck sitting on his couch, in his boxers, drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette, watching the football game. EXCEPT he was sitting in a laundromat just outside Paris. So, beer bellied redneck in boxers is sitting in the doorway, not about to move for the world, staring at the machines going round instead of at a football game. Fine. I walk in, put my stuff in the machines and sit down to wait.

The owner comes in, asks the man if his clothes are in the washing machine (hoping, I think that the answer is yes), and tells him he can't drink in the laundromat. So, since he's sitting in the doorway, he politely moves his can of beer to the outside of the doorway without leaving his seat. Time passes, the owner leaves, I'm writing letters, and the dryer next to me stops. The scantily clad Frenchman gets up pulls ALL his clothes, and I mean ALL his clothes out of the dryer and puts them on. Socks, shoes, pants, shirt, sweatshirt, jacket. Everything. Then he says goodbye to the other woman in the laundromat as if they were good friends, shakes my hand and leaves.

The other woman in the laundromat (I later learned her name is Sandra -- we bonded over this incident) looks at me and kind of shrugs like "that was strange but whatever" and I asked her if she knew him. "No. I've never seen him before." She then told me how she had been doing laundry when he came in and just started taking all his clothes off. Off came the jacket, the shoes, the socks, the shirt, the pants...he paused at the boxers, looked at her, then started to take them off anyway. She quickly intervened since a public laundromat really isn't the place to strip down and wash ALL your clothes and told him he couldn't do that. He seemed pretty intent, his boxers were wet, so she gave him a towel to wrap himself in while he waited for his clothes to wash and dry.

So in reality, what I had walked in on was the end of the very interesting afternoon she'd had at the laundromat. For me it had been one of a series of events in my day, but was by far the most memorable. Prior to the laundromat I had finally managed to get my bank account validated after a month of waiting, which meant I could get my cell phone, which meant I had a means of being reached when away from my apartment. While all of that was very exciting for me, that was not what I was waiting to tell my friends about that night when we met to watch the Rugby game. It was apparently not a good night for the French since they were ultimately clobbered at the last minute by the English in the semi-finals of the Rugby World Cup.