You world travelers know that drying the laundry means hanging it out in whatever weather happens to follow. I have seen clean clothes hanging sodden on lines for a week or more during rainy winter weather all over Europe. Does this make them cleaner, or does it save a little on the rinse cycle? I imagine that in China the whites go out bright and come back gray on the heaviest pollution days in Beijing. All that matters is that clothes get to have air. In a few countries this means that the actual washing is optional. Air them out, do the sniff test, and they are ready to go. Believe me, you don’t want to be on the bus that these folks ride to work.
One of our neighbors in France prefers to have her laundry very well-aired. For the past week we have admired two beach towels decorated with lizards, plus a couple of small rugs (one of them nearly torn in half like some ancient patriarch might have done to his garment in anguish over his daughter marrying a Saracen. On an earlier visit it was a set of well-used jeans of considerable size, meaning that we would never think of going over to complain when her husband was home. I have actually never seen anything but a couple of cats in the window, but if the man exists, he is a giant. Maybe she just does this to mess with us. Jann hangs her bikini out to dry in return. Laundry wars!
Bedding can be especially interesting. A Nordic-looking woman above us does a thorough shaking of the sheets each morning (cookie crumbs?) followed by a precise thirty-minute sun bath. Others prefer to let their blood-red (and black ) sheets flap around all day for everyone to see. The other day I noticed the neatest assortment of laundry, all color-coordinated, hanging on the front of a building. It looked like contemporary art. Today, there was a huge flag hanging from the Citadelle. Not laundry; it is Bastille Day. Vive la France.! They have been our closest friends since the Revolutionary War.
