French Laundry

Some things here are surprisingly cheap. You ask for water, non bubbly and you get Evian. Except over here, since it�s made here, it�s just simply �water� as opposed to some fancy imported French water that spelled backwards is “naive”.
Pain Chocolat is just an Euro, great way to have a fast breakfast. Coffee is good and reasonably priced as long as it’s not Starchuck’s.
The Metro has a tourist pass that�s not a bad deal too.
Some things here are surprisingly expensive, such as doing two loads of laundry. You see, I had this plan to get up early (which I did at 0700), go to the laverie nearby my hotel (I did) and do my laundry (I did not, at least right away).
The laveria had a machine that dispensed detergent. I wrote that in the past tense because the machine was not working. The coin thingy was bolted up and there were no other vending machines in any of the three laverias nearby.
I had to wait until 0900 to go to the Marche to get detergent. Then I did laundry.
A medium sized box of detergent cost about 2 Euro.
It cost 4 Euro to run the washing machine. Since I did two loads, that�s 8 Euro.
Then it took 20 minutes for one load and 30 minutes for the other to dry. That�s 1 Euro for every 10 minutes. Total for dry clothes: 5 Euro.
Add that all up and it cost 15 Euro for two loads of laundry. That�s close to US$20!
Chi Sin!