Cleaning floors, Israeli style

This country is incredibly dusty. There is more dust here than I have ever experienced in Australia. It must be blowing off the Sahara.

All this means that our apartment gets dirty fast - dust covering everything and that lovely grainy feeling under your feet as you walk on the tiles. Now if I were in Australia I would fix this with a quick dust, a vacuum, and a mop. But no, that's not how it's done here!

So here are the amazing steps to cleaning your floor in Israel.

1) lift everything off the floor. Not just chairs, but everything. Pile chairs on top of tables, couch chairs on top of the couch, computer off the floor, cables off the floor, everything.

2) fill a large bucket with hot soapy water

3) throw the water all over every floor in the house. Puddles are required everywhere.

4) get a water scraper thingo and push the water into every corner of the house so it makes the dust and dirt soggy. Lift up every piece of furniture, beds, giant bookcases, everything. You must catch all the dust and dirt with the water!

Amit cleaning the floor - notice the furniture piled up!

5) scrape the lovely dirty water from all over the house into the hole in the floor, which is usually located up a slope, in a tiny corner of the bathroom.

6) drape a piece of cloth soaked in fresh water over the scraper thingo and use it as a mop to get the rest of the water of the floor. Somehow you are supposed to manage to keep this piece of fabric draped over the scraper. I've no idea how! I ended up standing on the cloth and shuffling around the house.

7) put all the pieces of furniture back, plug everything back in, and you are done. It only took us (2 people) over an hour to complete.

Needless to say, Amit and I have only cleaned the house in this way once. I tried an improvised version (partially throwing water around and scraping it into a whole, partially shuffling around the house on the cloth, pretending I was a mop).

Finally a few weeks ago we bought a mop. Now I'm sweeping and mopping, and not using the Israeli scraper, which I was obviously not born to handle!

Here are a couple of blogs that share my experience with cleaning Israeli style.
You have got to be kidding
Lesson 5 - this is a mop