Foreign toilets
Ok, so this isn’t exactly a poop story but hope you’ll accept it anyway. [it's all poop to us. - Ed.]
Have you ever been to France? I took four years of French language in high school, thinking it would help if I traveled there. Wrong. The French people made fun of my attempts to speak, laughed right in front of me and refused to reply. Now I suppose it’s my turn (thought I loved it there overall).
The toilets in France are like thrones. At hotel after hotel I ran into some of the most bizarre contraptions they called toilets. They had ‘em all built up on pedestal upon pedestal, often with nothing more than a shower curtain around the throne. One of them looked like a medieval torture device with a black rubber bladder inside. I flushed it to see if would flush the whole room, but instead it overflowed for several minutes, leaving a pool of water all across the floor. When I asked the sup if their was another one, they just laughed and laughed.
In Japan International airport, they seem to want to humble foreigners with the toilets. Most of the country has modern toilets, but the airport has a stall with a hole in the floor. Not very welcoming.
I’m curious to know what people have encountered in other countries?
3 Responses
A quick search revealed Toilets of the World, now in the blogroll.
Oh gawd! That’s some major ick factor to get over. Imagine you avoided toilets in that part of town.
I spent time in Ethiopia where I became quite accustomed to using squat toilets. Only hotels and the homes of the well-off had toilets (there isn’t plumbing at all for most). Thinking back, low water pressure and scarcity of plumbers didn’t make indoor plumbing all that attractive even when you could afford it. There are advantages to the squat toilets once you get the hang of it: less paper used. seems like a natural position for evacuation as well. Those tanks do fill up eventually however and… the bugs. There was one section of the capital city that had a sort of infestation and full tanks roiled with large, what I assume were maggots !!