I just discovered something that makes me love Bangkok even more. You can have your apartment cleaned—floors swept and mopped, furniture dusted, windows washed, bathroom scrubbed, even the dirty porch brushed off—for six American dollars plus tip. Those of you who know me well know cleaning’s not exactly my thing. There are just too many better ways of spending time, including going to the dentist and filing taxes. I’ve never understood those who say it’s therapeutic. I’ll buy into meditation, exercise, yoga, gardening … but not scrubbing bathroom tile grout in a futile effort to remove mildew. I recently read about Bangkok that once you move into an apartment, you will be asked about employing a maid, and that many foreigners will at first think it’s lazy or exploitive and insist on doing the work themselves, and then they will come to realize that it’s expected and that they’ve disappointed the would-be maid whose salary could have been higher. My thoughts turned immediately to the woman who’s here all day cleaning up the premises and who cleaned my apartment before I moved in (I know that because when I signed the lease, I asked if I could move in in, oh, about two hours, so she was just finishing up when I arrived with my overstuffed suitcases still reeling from allergies to the previous apartment). I thought, my god, I hope I haven’t been disappointing her this entire time. I was never asked and given the chance to decline for moralistic reasons and then reconsider my position. So I approached my building manager, and after a careful dance of communication between the two of us, she said something to the effect of, “Oh, you need your room cleaned? Yes, you just tell me when you want it cleaned and she’ll come up on the same day,” like I was never supposed to be cleaning it myself in the first place. “How much?” “200 baht.” Deal. So I just walked into my spic-and-span pad and feel like I could eat off the floor (although my food hygiene standards are a tad lower these days).
