Cleanliness — Blog

Habits (stay clean)

At my age - a prime 36 years old - the difficulty in traveling is the breaking of my daily routine at home. Like James Clear, I am big on habits and consistency. Traveling does make a stop to that stuff. Take for example: when I am away from home for long periods, I can’t take the usual supplements. Another example: I can’t workout when I’m traveling. Is the temporary pause detrimental? Probably not. But it just feels weird, you know?

What’s also weird is being in hotels. Most of them - expensive or otherwise - do not match up to my standards of cleanliness. Especially so for hotels in America. The western culture of not taking off your shoes indoors means accommodations here in the States have a higher baseline of dirtiness. You can vacuum that carpet all you want, housekeeping. Doesn’t change the fact that many shoes have walked over that surface.

Things are slightly better in Asia, with our culture of taking shoes off before entering an abode. Even then, the level of cleanliness scales linearly with the amount-per-night cost of the hotel (in my experience, anyways). The only experience that lived up to my admittedly high standards is the ryokan around the Mount Fuji area in Japan. That cost $250 a night in 2019 money. Read: that is expensive for me.

If I am to stay in an accommodation for at least a few days, what I do is clean the floors myself (when possible). That might sound insane to you, but the peace of mind is worth it. Plus, I get to enjoy actually clean floors. Can’t beat that!

How often to wash?

I am thinking of a few weeks back when I was hanging out with a few classmates from improv class. The ice-breaking question (of which there were many) of “How often do you wash your bed sheets?” came to the table. I guess it’s a measure of how disgusting or clean a person is, depending on the answer.

My answer was once a month. That is caveated by the fact I shower before I go to sleep. That’s how I was raised. So much so that I cannot fathom going to bed without first showering before. How do you people do it? Those of you who showers in the morning, go through a whole day of work and grime, then climb into bed at night with only a change to pajamas. I would love to see a Venn diagram of people who shower in the morning, and people who wear shoes indoors.

It is because I always go to bed freshly cleaned that I can delay washing the bed sheets to once a month. If I were the type to not bathe before bed, I probably would switch the sheets out every few days. You know, just like they do in hotels. I always thought it was weird that hotels in America have a habit of changing out the bed sheets daily (Las Vegas sexy time notwithstanding). Then I realize it’s because of American culture of shower in the morning, not at night. Of course you have to change sheets more often if people go to bed all dirty and stuff from the day.

Other answers from my classmates: once a week, once every two weeks, and once every six months?! Granted, the last answer was from a guy who also showers before bed like I do. Still, six months of unchanging bed sheet is kind of… not that sanitary. We’re don’t live in college dorms anymore, you guys.