washing dishes, or, Yes, My Life Really Is This Boring

I often wonder, as I wash dishes, whether I'm not actually making them dirtier by washing them in tap water.

Washing dishes is quite a procedure here. First I pick up the plastic tub full of accumulated dirty dishes...

(Wait, no, scratch that. This is my blog, and I'm going to take you to a magical fantasy land in which I wash every dish the moment it becomes dirty, and never, ever let them accumulate.)

Washing dishes is quite a procedure here. First I pick up the plastic tub full of dishes that have just now gotten dirty and pass it out the window to sit on the shelf of the kitchen sink, which is on the balcony. Then I put on my dishwashing outfit--flipflops and a big apron. The flipflops are because I don't want my feet to get wet, and the apron is because I'm incapable of using the sprayer on the sink without spraying myself. Next I gather up my sponges and dish soap, and head outside.

The first order of business is to clean out the sink--it is outside, after all, and is often graced with...well, bird droppings. One of my sponges/scratchy scourers is only used for cleaning the sink. Instead of a faucet, we've got a spray nozzle on our sink. It's very convenient and very strong, and I'm glad we bought it. We saw it at Tesco Lotus and bought it, not realizing (as we figured out when we got it home) that no Thai person would EVER attach this sprayer to a kitchen sink. It's for...um...a more personal purpose: it's meant to be attached to the bathroom plumbing and hung on the wall next to the toilet, and provides the water for the cleaning that Thai people do instead of using toilet paper. I bet that any Thai person who saw our kitchen sink would think we had truly gone off the stupid-farang deep end. Oh well; it works for us. (We do have these sprayers in our bathrooms too, but we only use them to clean the bathroom floor. Very handy, actually.)

After I wash the sink, I wash the plastic tub. After I wash the plastic tub, I wash the dishes. To keep our sink's drains from getting clogged with old food, I spray the dirtier dishes and rinse the food into the drain in the floor, which has a little trap. Generally I accidentally spray the pigeons sitting on the ledge while I'm doing this, making them mad and causing them to fly away for about 10 seconds before they come back. Once I sprayed a gecko. By the time I'm done washing and rinsing dishes, the floor is soaking wet (and would be even if I wasn't pre-spraying dishes onto the floor--my acknowledgement that the floor was going to get wet anyway was what led me to start the pre-spraying in the first place).

I carry the tub of clean dishes back inside and set them into the dish drainer (which is really just a set of wire shelves), where they drip on the floor.

If I were Thai, this would be a lot simpler: I'd wash the dishes directly in the plastic tub, which I'd fill with soapy water. Then I'd rinse them in the tap in the bathroom. This is actually what I did for the first six months we lived here; believe me, the sink is better.