Showering

My Shower

I mentioned in one of my earlier posts that I was lucky because I have been placed in a house with a real shower with hot water. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that I am showering every day here in Georgia. My goal is always to get a shower in once every two days, but usually I’m lucky if I can get 3 showers a week, usually it’s closer to two.

To get into the shower I need to face a few battles. First, the hot water must be turned on. Unfortunately, we don’t have on demand hot water, but a hot water tank that must be heated up. Just turning it on doesn’t mean I have hot water. I’m not sure how long you need to wait to get hot water, but it’s usually more time than I have. I’ve waited up to an hour for the water to warm up, but that is still not long enough.

Then, if there is hot water, the next problem I must face is whether or not the shower head is working. For the past two weeks, every time I have wanted to take a shower, there has been some problem with the shower so that only a dribble of water actually makes it out of the shower head, the rest drips down the cord. If my host father is at home, he can always fix it for me, but if he is not home, which is often the case, then I must go without the shower.

So, lastly, if I do have hot water, and I do have water pressure to take a shower, I must consider the temperature. If the wood stove is burning and the house is warm (and by warm I mean not cold) than taking a shower might be reasonably comfortable. If the wood stove is not burning, that means that the house is the same temperature as outside, and just to give you an idea of what temperature that is, we had our first frost this week. Getting undressed and into a shower when the air temperature is in the single digits (Celsius) is not a fun time, even if the water is hot. There’s never enough water pressure to cover my body, so one part of me is hot from the water, but the rest of me is freezing. Therefore, morning showers have now become impossible.

Now, me and my friends look forward to the weekends when we can stay at a hostal with a good, hot shower and hopefully one that even has central heating so we’re warm when we get out of the shower and warm when we sleep. That doesn’t always happen, hostals and guesthouses are often the same as our own homes, if not colder, but that is at least the goal. And I'm one of the lucky ones. Many folks I know live in villages and don't even have hot water (or an indoor bathroom) to speak of.