Clean Up Your Act

Those who know me will attest that I am never going to be in the running for any "housekeeper of the year" awards. Cleaning is not my thing -- never has been. But that's not to say that I don't like a clean house, and when called for I will roll up my sleeves and get scrubbing (with only minimal grumbling along the way).

So it always amazes me how some people who have a choice can just choose to happily live amid filth. OK, cleaning may not be that much fun, but let's face it people, it's just a necessary evil.

We moved into a subletted one-bedroom apartment on Saturday and spent most of the weekend cleaning. It looked neat on the surface, but it was by no means clean. Certainly not clean enough for us to feel comfortable putting our stuff away or using the kitchen. Two of us, working steadily pretty much all day yesterday still didn't get the job done.

Living in a clean home is not just a hygiene issue. Clean environments -- or at least the illusion of a clean environment -- may even have an impact on our behaviour. Research conducted last year found that people behave more generously and more fairly when they are in clean-smelling environments.

Participants in the study were given several tasks; some worked in unscented rooms, while others were set their tasks in rooms sprayed with a citrus-smelling cleanser. According to the Toronto Star:

Given $12, they had to decide how much to keep and how much to return to a partner who had trusted them. Those in the clean-smelling rooms gave back an average of $5.33, compared with $2.81 from the no-smell rooms.

Another experiment, looking at charitable behaviour, found those in the lemony-fresh room expressed more interest in volunteering for a service project and donating money. Twenty-two per cent said they'd like to give money, compared to 6 per cent of those with unteased nostrils.

What a difference a day makes

Here's what Halifax harbour looked like yesterday, in the rain and fog:

And here's the view today:

As they like to say out here, "If you don't like the weather, just wait 20 minutes..."

Our New Life: Week One

Life in a hotel is a bit of a treat... I must say I love the king-size bed and the fact that someone else comes to clean my bathroom every day! Our room looks east, over Halifax harbour, and in the mornings we can watch the sun come up. We've been sleeping pretty well, except for that one night when we woke up at 3am to the shrieks of an Asian call girl in the next room.

We emptied the stuff out of the minibar and filled it instead with our own food. In the mornings, we make coffee and have bananas, yogurt and granola. Lunch the past few days has been ham and cheese sandwiches, with Gruyere cheese given to us by our Swiss friend Nicolas. Dinner last night was at Kempster's, our favorite family restaurant, but other nights we sit on the floor and have a "picnic" of olives, hummus, cheese, prosciutto and other yummy things. There's a wine store and supermarket right next to the hotel, which is very convenient!

The house/apartment hunt is a bit of a drag, though I'm trying not to let it get me down. We have the eternal problem of "champagne tastes and a beer budget" so all the houses we like would put us into big fat debt. The stuff we could afford is uninspiring at best. I've been thinking it might be better to rent, but even the rental market is really tight and competitive right now and the sales market is downright crazy... I hope we have some luck this weekend as I'd much rather be in our own place.

This morning I spent two hours doing a writing and editing test for the CBC, with an eye to doing some web news writing work. I think I did OK, though two hours is not a lot of time for what they asked... I am now exhausted! Might head to the pool for a quick swim. That is one thing I WILL miss about living in a hotel!

Kaos in K-Town

I've just spent the past week in Karachi, which makes Sana'a look like an orderly paradise. The only word I could think to describe it is chaotic. There are people, children, animals, cars everywhere and no rules to keep them all straight. 

Even if there is a rule, no one pays any attention. Like boarding the plane at the airport: the announcement said "we are boarding business class and families with children" and everyone rushed forward. Instead of sending them back to wait, the airline staff started collecting boarding cards, so off we all went, business class be damned!

The photo above shows two buses so close to each other a piece of paper would barely fit between them. This is pretty normal and par for the course there -- only an idiot like me would notice and even bother to take a photo.

The nerve centre of the chaos appears to be my great-aunt's house. She has several people who help her in the house, which is also pretty normal over there. But on my first day there, I saw way more people than I remembered from my last trip. 

One guy comes twice a week to dust furniture. But he doesn't do windows, so another boy comes two or three times a week to do that. He is also supposed to pick up some stuff in the garden, but he doesn't, so another guy comes to do that. Something breaks every single day and a new handyman is called to fix each device. No one ever comes alone, so at any given moment there seem to be about two dozen random people wandering the house. Meanwhile, the front door is ringing, back gate is buzzing, both phones are ringing and no one answers till the 10th ring, great-aunt Dee calls out to the cook to send the driver so he can call the gardener... chaos.

Chatting with the immigration officer at JFK this morning, he asked how things are in Pakistan and I tried to explain the lack of order and the people running everywhere. 

"Sounds like Manhattan," he said.

Perhaps!