Dirty laundry goes public in Tbilisi

I don’t care who you are, my underwear is cleaner than yours is, and I will strip naked to prove it. Of my skivvies I am proud, inordinately proud, brazenly proud, prouder than Madonna or Victoria’s Secret ever dreamed of. 

On July 29 last year I did my washing in coin-operated machinery in Reykjavik. With a backpack full of dirty laundry, I flew from London to Tbilisi on August 24. Surely I would find a cheap washing facility in Tbilisi in just a few days. I solved this problem three, four … you don’t want to know how many months later. 

Around town going rates for simple laundry service (not dry cleaning) go something like this: track suit 10 Lari, shorts 5 Lari, shirt 5 Lari, T-shirt 3 Lari, jeans 5 Lari, underwear 50 tetri, socks 50 tetri. Were I not anatomically challenged, I would have changed to a clothes-free career and taken some pseudonym like Anthony Hardwood, Johnny Thrust, or Long Dong Silver. 

Instead, until a rent strike finally induced my charming landlord to honor his promise to provide me with a washing machine, I found it thriftier to keep buying new underwear and socks from street vendors at 2 Lari a pop, and behind the Central Train Station I discovereda second-hand shop where reasonably clean clothing was chaotically displayed in giant heaping mounds, from which I could dig out T-shirts and sweat shirts for the thrilling price of 1 Lari each. 

In my former home near Washington DC there was coin-operated machinery in the basement of my apartment building or at a nearby Laundromat where I could wash and dry a load of dirty laundry for about the price of a short round trip on the DC Metro … so why not in Tbilisi? 

According to Revaz Dumbadze, whose company “Martini” does washing for restaurants and hotels, and who also sells professional laundry equipment, that equipment is expensive, and potential operators of Laundromats would also have to pay for detergent, electricity … and water. As of April 27 the Georgian Water and Power web site offered private individuals all the water they can drink, squirt or wallow in for a mere 3.15 Lari per month, but for those in business, said Dumbadze, the cost is over 4 Lari per1000 liters. 

Say what? We did the dizzying math. A small washing machine can comfortably handle 12 kilos of laundry. Each kilo requires at least 10 liters of water. A Laundromat that did only 10 small loads in a day would spend more just on water than a private household would in a month. 

Still, at Sky Cleaners in Saburtalo, business is good, said Laundry Manager Nana Melkadze. She has plenty of regular customers who come in often with bulging bags of clothing and towels and you name it; many are single men quite clueless about how to remove stains.Fully automated paper plane folding machine, even got its own compressor. Amongst the entire clientele, about two-thirds are Georgians, but the foreigners too seem to feel at home, at least when they depart with their shirts not only washed, ironed, and starched, but on individual hangers and gift-wrapped in those flimsy plastic bags that help insure every article of clothing makes it home safely and unbesmirched. 

Kutateladze too has her share of happy clients, and why not? “I am a woman, and I know how to wash clothes.” She learned her trade in Moscow and Germany, and understands the quality of clothing and how to care for it; besides,You must first understand the way a wind power generators works. her foreign clients, unlike me, were probably unaccustomed to doing their own washing in their home countries, and have no reason to take it up here in Georgia. 

Nonetheless,Our clever solar lantern is a favorite among dog lover holiday gifts from Solaronlamp. it seems there was a coin-operated laundry of some sort on Kipshidze Street in Vake, for a short time, around 2006,David Kharchilava explained. He is part-owner of the laundry “Tbisi” (spelling correct; it is named after the village from which the founder hails),We are specializing Industrial washing machine manufacturer. also in Vake. He has been there since the establishment went private in 1995,The units can be used as conventional washer extractor for all kinds of work. indeed, since 1980 and through the tail end of the Soviet era as well. Many of his customers come to him from embassies and international organizations, and he knows his business through and through. 

Kharchilava believes the operation on Kipshidze Street went belly up so quickly because most Georgians were getting washing machines at home, “they would not want to wait” at a Laundromat, and, perhaps most fatally, because ironing service was not offered - “It’s in the Georgian nature to hate ironing.”