Why does it have to be so complicated?

My sweater smelled like mildew yesterday when I pulled it on, not because I’d left it sitting in the washer for too long but because with the rainy, cold, damp weather and our much too dark area where clothes hang to dry, it takes so long to dry that some things just smell like mildew.

It was the last straw. Sara and Stephen and I have been talking about buying a dryer, and Sara and I decided to go after work to buy one. In Bogota, everything has it’s own section in town. Sara had just happened to run into appliances while looking for shoes the other day. So, we set off in a drizzle that soon turned into a downpour, feeling thankful that soon we would have a dryer and wouldn’t be worried about damp sweatshirts.

On 15, shop after shop of gleaming appliances waited for us. We walked in and out of stores, comparison shopping. It wasn’t until somewhere around the 7^th store that we ran into trouble. “Sure we have electric dryers”, the man said, “for 220 voltage”. We looked at each other, confused. “Is there any other kind of voltage here?” we asked. Turns out there is- 110. We had no idea what kind of voltage we have, so we called our friend Tony who’s done some electrical work for us. We have 110. Turns out they don’t make dryers for 110 voltage, and if you try to run a 220 dryer on 110 voltage you won’t get good results (I’m not really clear if it takes longer, costs twice as much, doesn’t fully dry the clothes or all of the above)

Between the 3 salesmen we talked to on our way back (as they helpfully asked if we’d found anything after all) we learned we basically have 3 options- 1. Learn to live with mildewy clothes and waiting days for dry jeans and towels. 2. Get a gas run dryer. Call the gas company to come out and give us a quote on what it would cost to put in another gas hookup, then have them do the physical labor. Or 3. Get a “trifasica” which is some sort of converter operation or something which changes your voltage.

I’m frustrated because I was hoping to have a dryer delivered today, and instead now we have to make phone calls and do research and hope that notoriously slow service here doesn’t mean we don’t actually not end up with a dryer for months. We’ll also end up spending more money since neither the trifasica nor the gas hookup sound like inexpensive options.

Oh well. Such is life.