The Glamorous Life in Italia

 There are the big differences when you're overseas, and then there are the small ones. If you've lived overseas you know that one of the smallest (but which has the biggest consequences) relates to washing your clothes. When I lived in Abu Dhabi one of the reasons why I insisted on moving from the hyper posh Radisson Blue to the long-term place next door was having my own washing machine, as compared to carefully counting out the number of free clothes that we were allowed each week (although it was awfully damn posh there - of course, having free access to all that we could drink every night at happy hour would have killed me eventually anyway). Here's a picture of our laundry rack on our balcony at our new place. What you learn very quickly when you live overseas is that owning an expansive and separate washer and dryer is very much an American phenomenon. Here we have a washer/dryer (much I had when I lived in Abu Dhabi or in the places I've rented in Portugal) in one machine. It's a dryer in the sense that a few more spins leaves the clothes "dryer" than simply coming out of the washer alone. You still need to hang them up, which is not a problem when you live in a place as hot and sunny as Sicily.

And this is so much better than what we dealt with at our first apartment in Terrasini, when we had to set up the rack on the sidewalk outside the front door, hoping that the wind or the motorcycles didn't knock it over. And that's not even mentioning the neighbors who would unplug our water pump - and even lock the door to the water pump - so that we couldn't do laundry if we wanted to. Here we have privacy, and you can freely hang out your underwear without inspiring community commentary.