Boiling water sterilizes right? So what’s the big deal? You just flush out any possible remaining flakes and if you want to be 100% sure boil a “cleaning” kettle before you boil your actual tea water.
Mostly kidding
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I’m Australian and I’d never do this. I do dry my underwear in the toaster though.
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I once spent a month in the desert eating noodles cooked in Gatorade because I’d run out of water.
A kettle would’ve been an unthinkable luxury…
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This is why I don’t visit N America without a travel kettle.
And attempting to use a 230V UK kettle in 120V San Francisco was a mistake I won’t make twice…
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Yeah but a two week business trip in Korea exhausted my underwear supply, so I had to improvise (not using the kettle).
Oh and BTW its Auckland.
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On the other hand using a 120v immersion coil on 230v is absolutely great. The water boils almost before you put the coil in. Of course, the appliance doesn’t last very long before it breaks and there’s probably a non-trivial chance of death, but one must make sacrifices. As it were.
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Pica is pretty normal everywhere, so I’m sure some of you DO. As for it being a particularly Southern thing, that smells like a story for tourists, but who knows? Maybe that one kind of clay is especially good to eat, so people indulge the impulse more, or more visibly, in places where it’s available.
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You must have had a LOT of gatorade.
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I wasn’t in one place; I was travelling, and had ten litres of fluid. Half water, half gatorade. A mishap along the way cost me the water, and…
I was only on gatorade noodles for about a week of the month-long trip. After that, I passed a roadhouse that let me fill from their bore. That water was almost as salty as the sea, but you could live on it.
I’d developed quite a taste for it by the time I made it back to town; city water is bland.
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Earlier in the year i did the same at a hotel room during a trip with family. They wanted to make coffee using the coffee maker in the room and i declined, you never know what its been through and it’s not like the hotel staff with go through the trouble of properly cleaning it after every time the room is used.
Yeah, this is totally a thing, I know heaps of underwear boilers. We also wipe our arses on curtains.
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I’m always teabagging my underwear. It’s kinda how the whole thing works.
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It’s #1 on my list!
Eww.
I always seem to under-pack socks on long trips. Stayng comfortable while hiking around a city as a tourist means changing socks two or three times a day. I end up washing 'em in the sink. Warm tap water and hand soap, wring and rinse and wring again.
I’ve washed underwear that way too.
Big trick is drying. The solution: Get a spare towel, lay flat on bed, lay on wrung-dry socks and undies, roll up tight. After a few hours, unroll and hang up wherever for final drying. Overnight is usually fine.
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Coffee makers are common in US hotels.
The hotel I stayed in last March in London had a kettle, plus packets of tea and instant coffee. I don’t remember the design of the kettle; I don’t think the lid opened such that you could stick underwear in there.
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That’s a cool story. Thanks for sharing that. I would be pretty alarmed in your position if I had to stretch 5 liters of fluid that long in the desert. Glad you made it through.
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Well, they are called coffee makers, but good luck getting anything like a decent cup of coffee out of one of them.
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They do it in Western Europe too. Literally you can buy bags of mineral clay for eating. I had to do a whole paper on the economic uses of Kaolin clays a couple semesters ago.
