Uh . . . you forgot something

Laundry in a hotel is tricky. The service provided by the hotel is not cheap (unlike most things in Thailand) so we usually go out on the street in search of some local place that will do it. Sometimes they charge per item, some places just charge per load. You can drop your clothes off in the morning and pick them up later or the next day neatly pressed and smelling like an entire factory of soap. It's a good deal, and it's worked for us until now. That's right - until now. Because there's a first for everything.

We dropped our laundry off one morning last week and were told we could pick it up the next day at 8 a.m. Good thing because Megan and I were down to our last pairs of underwear. When Erik went to pick it up, the woman was overloaded and said it wouldn't be dry until 6 p.m. We were headed out for dinner and a movie that evening, so Erik picked up the laundry, threw it in our room, and we were off.

When we got back, I started unpacking our laundry and had a brief thought, "What if she didn't give us our underwear back. That would suck because we don't have any more." Unpack. Unpack . . . hey, wait a second. Is there another bag? Because I don't see much . . . underwear. One pair of mine. One pair of Ethan's. Two of Erik's. None of Megan's. This is not right.

Knowing there was nothing we could do, we went to bed and jokingly said, "Hey, remember that time in Thailand when we lost all our underwear? That was crazy," while trying to imagine staying calm and joyful if we found that the laundry woman gave our clothes to someone else.

The next day Erik went back to check with the woman. She responded with looks of confusion, but no underwear. So we put up a sign in the elevators asking people to keep a watch out for any clothes that weren't theirs. Since most of the people taking laundry to her were our friends, we figured they would show up eventually.

Sure enough, later that morning, my friend Sonya called and said, "Do you have Old Navy underwear?" I do! When she found a bunch of unfamiliar underwear in her laundry, she figured it was mine and told the woman, "I need to call my friend." The woman took this as an invitation to try out other lost items, holding them out and asking, "My friend?" to which Sonya would respond, "No my friend."

So all is well. Our underwear is back safe and sound. And I just wrote a whole post about lost underwear. Lots of firsts happening these days.