When you travel for long periods of time, certain practial issues tend to come up. Eating out becomes less for fun and more for subsistence, you find the need to check your email and call your parents, and you have to occasionally get clean underwear. The last can be quite a task.
Growing up I can remember my mother washing our clothes in sinks and bathtubs of hotels, and on one particularly hilarious trip we washed at a laundromat in Ireland, then walked bags of wet clothes 30 minutes back to our bed and breakfast. They didn’t seem so heavy when we started!
Determined not to get holes in all my socks due to the hotel laundry stapling them together, I have found a laundromat, after asking half a dozen coworkers. It is downtown, about a 30 minute bus ride from my hotel, so going is an event. This past Tuesday I was desperate for new running shorts and socks, and could wait no longer, so I filled my laundry bag to the brim and headed downtown.
There are many dry cleaners in Genova, but few self service laundromats, in fact this is the only one I’ve found after 2 months here. The dry cleaners often have laundry service, for ridiculous prices, and as I’ve learned from the hotel laundry, they often staple stuff to your clothes. Besides that, I don’t really like having strangers handle my delicates. The laundromat is located near Piazza Ferrari, down Viale Canneto al lungo near Cattedrale di San Lorenzo. If you follow the flow of people from Piazza Ferrari to the west, and stay to the left side of the street, you will eventually see Viale Canneto al Curto. Take a left and then right on the first street and that will be Canneto al Lungo. This is a very small street, as most of them are, and is mostly pedestrians. There are small shops and cafes, and men like to hang out on the sidewalk getting drunk. The laundromat is almost at the end of the street, next to a vegetable and fruit store.
Inside you will find an Eritrean woman who immigrated to Italy in her childhood. If you are lucky, and don’t speak Italian, you will find her brother there as well and he will talk to you in English for hours. Or perhaps that is the unlucky situation!
There are three washers and two dryers, 3.50 euro for a wash and 1 euro for each 8 minutes of drying. I find it takes about 4 euro to dry. It seems expensive, 7.50 euro for one load, but it’s much less than taking everything to a cleaner! You can also buy soap there for 1 euro, which should do two loads, though honestly I put it all in one load.
While you are waiting the 35 minutes for wash you can shop on Via XX Septembre or explore the small streets around the laundromat. While you wait for your dry you can try lunch or dinner at a cafe nearby. There are many places to choose from, pizza, sandwiches, Italian cuisine, even an Indonesian restaurant. And if you are longing for home, there is a McDonalds on Via XX that will satisfy the craving for a burger and fries.
