my bathroom blog

Updates will be in black, previous content will be in grey. 
Yea, I know, this could get a sketchy really fast. But this is one of the top things future World Racers are curious about and I can't let them down. Plumbing around the world is not the same. I visited Greece this summer and experienced it for the first time. In the city of Athens, you are not allowed to flush toilet paper down the toilet. There is a little trash can next to the toilet and that's where it goes. It's a beautiful ancient city, and the pipes are very small and cannot handle paper being flushed down them. I also noticed the presence of a baday to be prominent there as well. So make no mistake, this is not a commentary on toilets of the third world. It is not meant to insult anyone. It's purely informational and sometimes comical. It's about the interesting differences that we encounter along the way, and the confusion that arises as we ask for directions to the restroom, and of course use it. As Americans, we are very used to a restroom/bathroom being a pretty standardized thing. Maybe some are dirtier than others, or there may or may not be the presence of toilet paper or hand soap (think college dude's bathrooms), toilet seat covers, automatic running water, the door might not lock quite right, and the method of drying hands changes. The shower is a whole separate story, and I'll get to that as well. Around there world there are differences in languages and customs and ways of life that affect us as we travel. If this makes you a little uncomfortable, discontinue reading now. If you're still with me, here we go:

Training Camp – a campsite where Tennessee meets North Carolina meets Georgia
  Name: Restroom/Bathroom
  Location: 3 separate "cabin" locations
  Quantity: 3 toilets per location and 2 to 3 showers
  The commentary: Everything looks pretty normal on day 1. Your standard bathroom at a campground. They start out clean and with the appropriate amount of hand towels, toilet paper, and hand soap. The toilets flush and the showers run with warm and cold water. Pretty soon, things get a little bit interesting. Throw 200 teenage to early 30somethings at a set of any restrooms and you're bound to have interesting complications. There were often lines of ladies waiting to use the restroom or shower. Toilet paper shortages. Hilarious! Toilets backed up, whole building plumbing systems went down from time to time. The showers became filled with bugs and red Georgia mud. I think we were in charge of cleaning them, no wonder they were messy. There was so much excitement with Training Camp, that cleaning the bathrooms was probably on the bottom of our list of fun things to do. That is, until they got a little yucky! Of course I forgot to bring shower shoes! What a silly head I am. My feet were sooo gross for the weeks following camp! I won't share details, but I was definitely embarrassed to even get a pedicure after that. I must have acquired a fungus or maybe just trench foot from our feet being wet in our shoes for a week straight. By the last day we'd lost hot water and the bugs living in our shower areas at night were so freaky. Some of the showers were backing up and flooding! What a mess! You can't let that many people descend upon a campsite and expect any less, but it was frightening!
 
Launch – Little Mexico, Gainsville, Georgia
  Name: Restroom/Bathroom
  Location: Restrooms located in the church we were staying in. Shower facilities: a hotel a couple of miles down the road.
  Quantity: Restrooms: 2 for men and 2 for women. Showers: 2 rooms for men, two for women.
  The commentary: There were plenty of bathrooms for us to use in the church we were staying in. Tho the men's and women's signs quickly became irrelevant due to the overwhelming majority that the ladies hold. We mobilized in teams at our specified shower times and made the 30 minute trek. Everything is done in at least a pair on the world race, even the journey to use the shower. It does make for a more entertaining situation. We shared hair dryers and my lovely teammate Christin flat ironed our hair. I think I only showered twice while I was there, and I was going for daily runs. The morning mist just made me feel clean. I use to really need to shower daily. It's amazing how one week of training camp and any level of shower stall grossness (in this case it was a fine motel, but after you have teams showering in one room for days, it gets a little sketchy) convince me that I really don't need that daily shower so badly. It always feel so so good to be clean tho. And you get the best compliments just for smelling good!
 
Hong Kong Airport – Our second layover
   Name: Oh no! I forgot to ask. Note to self: ask for the name of the restroom the next time we have a layover in Hong Kong
   Location: Nearish to our gate
   Quantity: Many
   The commentary: It was only a one hour layover and after verifying that these restrooms were more similar to the ones that we are used to in other major airports than they are different, we were more concerned with locating the ones with drinking fountains so that we could fill our water bottles. This would be the last time my water bottle was ever to be filled. More on this later. We were told that this was our last drinkable water in the foreseeable future on the race, so we reacted with filling our water bottled. Being the aspiring hippy that I am, with Kevin, I asked around and also filled the bottled of everyone else who needed it. The Northwest kids have to stick together in the fight for the use of reusable drinking bottles. It makes me cringe thinking that we'll be drinking out of plastic bottled water for 11 months and throwing it all away in a landfill. Cringe.
 
The Philippines – Manila/Malaybalay
   Name: CR. This stands for the Comfort Room.
   Location: Manila airport, and Manila KIM location, and Malaybalay airport, Malaybalay KIM location and various establishments in the town of Malaybalay.
   Quantity: Varied, see commentary
   The commentary: The Manila airport Comfort Room, besides having a different name, was very similar to those in the US. It was located in the customs area and this was a pretty large airport. I was a little worried using it. Just like in Hong Kong, I wasn't quite ready for my first unusual bathroom experience of this journey. No real surprises to be found. We arrived at KIM in Manila to find near luxury accommodations. It was a little like being at a camp as a kid, with bunk beds and showered showering areas. The showers had this neat contraption in them that heated up the water. It took me a while in my groggy state to figure out how to use it, but I was treated with a heated shower! I felt so spoiled. There is no flushing toilet paper down the toilets in these parts. That is something that is definitely hard to get used to. You just place it in the trash can next to the toilet. But these toilets flushed just like we are used to back home. So nothing really to throw us off yet. Then the Malaybalay airport Comfort Room threw us for a loop! Finally, some excitement. We were used to the tissue paper differences at this point, but my friend and I witnessed a woman going into the stall, doing what she needed to do, then coming out of the stall with a small scoop, heading back into the stall, coming back out and then leaving. "Is is for scooping out your poo!?" she wondered out loud. I'm not sure if that's where my mind would have gone, but once it was spoken out loud, I could think of no other logical explanation. Boy were we wrong. When we arrived at KIM in Malaybalay, we got a lesson in using the restrooms. Thank goodness! The toilets have a flush button, two of them actually. One of the number 1 (less water used) and a button for number 2 (more water). If neither of these buttons work, the instructions were to get the scoop, fill it with some water and place it in the toilet bowl. This should flush the contents down. Ah! This made sense. The issue was, the water for the toilets was turned off in my team's CR, and we were not aware of this. I figured out that if we filled the tank, and then pushed the buttons, we could make this flushing happen, but it would require more than the scoop, so we used a bucket. This went on about a week before we realized that it would be much more efficient to skip the push button flushing altogether and just use the scoop method. We've been doing that ever since and it works brilliantly! In town, at most of the public CR's, there is no toilet paper offered, so I've started carrying it with me in my purse. And the toilets in town don't even have the flush button, just the scoop. We've gotten quite used to it. It's made me VERY aware of how much water is wasted in each flush. When you have to trek it back and forth to the toilet (when we were filling the tank), you notice! We've settled in to quite the routine. We have showers that are definitely cold, but most of us have grown to like them. We're sharing shampoo and conditioner for now (it seems Americans are the only ones who like this Conditioner stuff, so it's quite hard to find). It is easier for our team to share toiletries of the showering sort, so that the weight of them is not carried around from place to place. There is a warm shower (similar to Manila) available in the room where the married couple is staying, but most people are content just using the cold showers. I don't known if I'd have such warm, haha, feelings for them if it weren't 80something degrees outside, but they are quite nice.

There is a small dispute we need settled. This is our CR trashcan. Is this a fish? Is it a duck? Or maybe something we haven't thought of yet…you decide

China – Hong Kong/Gansu Province

   Name: WC/"Squatty Potty"

   Location: Hostels, Hotels, Bus Stations, Border Crossings

   Quantity: Varied, see commentary

   The commentary: China was probably our first real shock into what the World Racers in the blogs we had read had been talking about. When we reached the border crossing in Hong Kong, I really didn't feel like I could hold it for much longer. I had been dreading this moment, but there was nothing I could do. I realized that it was a pay WC (stands for "water closet) so I thought I'd take a gamble and go for it. I was pleasantly surprised with the cleanliness of the facilities. Then I opened the stall and I saw it, the "squatty potty." It is kind of sink looking contraption in the ground with two places on either side that seem to be traction for where you place your feet. For the men this doesn't really change the game plan much, for us girls it is a whole different story. So many questions began running through my mind and I didn't have the answers to any of them. How far to I need to pull my pants down in order to assume the position. What exactly is the position? Do I face forward or backward? Is it going to splash back up at me? Is there a way to pull my jeans up so that it doesn't get on my pants, while still pulling my pants down, and also not falling down or into the hole? How do you flush this contraption? Do you flush it at all? Thank goodness I remembered to bring toilet paper in here. Oh goodness, there was no time for thinking! The bus was going to leave very soon and I had to make some quick decisions. I faced the stall door because for most of my life it is what I had been used to. I didn't get too low for fear of the splashing. I figured the whole experience was similar to camping and needing to find a place to go in the woods, if I could do that, I could do this. I survived!! It wasn't so bad. This was going to be easy! Here's where I was wrong.

 

The train that we boarded a few hours later had a squatty potty as well. It was contained in a bathroom that must have been about 2 feet by 3 feet. The men would spend a lot of time smoking in there, so when you first opened the door, you could not see a thing. The gentle swaying motion of the train added a whole new level of difficulty to the process, which I can't say I was all too proficient at yet after only having done it once before. We were on the train for 32 hours, so avoiding this experience was not an option. The first couple of times it really wasn't too bad. I felt like I was going to fall over, but I didn't. All was well. The bathroom did get increasingly more disgusting as the hours wore on though. It became quite apparent that no amount of cleaning that they did periodically could keep up with the destruction that was going on in there. I think it was after the train ride was over that one of my teammates mentioned the "handle" to me. It turns out there was something to hold onto so that you wouldn't fall over. Good to know. 

 

Some of our hotel rooms had "western style" toilets and showers. That was very nice. The only sketchy thing in those places was the way that the bathrooms were used and cleaned. The men who stay in the hotel rooms are known to spit directly onto the floors. Then the cleaning people use a mop and the toilet water to clean the bathroom floors. So I'm not sure I would label them as clean. Unfortunately or maybe fortunately for us, we didn't find this out until about halfway through the month. 

 

There was one hostel where the WCs were about 100 feet from our rooms. They were just two squatty potties shared by all of the guests at the hostel. We had to put on our headlamps to walk over at night and it was so cold! We brushed our teeth in an outdoor communal sink. There was a community shower as well, but the lighting was horror movie dim and there were spiders and spider webs everywhere and it looked like they hadn't been cleaned ever. It was at this hostel that our team decided that we would "not shower at all that month." My teammate Kat decided a few hours later to brave the showers. It was her idea in the first place to not shower for the month. Hilarious. The rest of us passed on the shower experience and just hoped that the next place we stayed would provide something different.

 

One night we stayed at a hostel that was actually a couple's apartment. We stayed in their two spare rooms and shared a bathroom with them. Even in the homes, the toilet is a squatty potty. The hilarious thing to me about this one and one of the others in another hostel, was that there was a window right behind you and your rear was exposed to anyone who was standing at that level across the way. Luckily it was on a higher than ground level floor, but feeling the cold winter air was a constant reminder that you were vulnerable.

 

When you're out and about, you must have toilet paper in your purse at all times. You should also carry some baby wipes to clean your hands or some antibacterial gel. Also make sure you have change on you, because they are probably going to charge you to use a public toilet. I think the time that I was the most grossed out was when I paid to use a toilet at it was actually a communal trough where you just picked your spot and went with everyone else. You straddled the trough and tried not to look down to watch the river of filth that was flowing down. For some reason it reminded me of that scene from Ghostbusters with the river of slime underground. Or maybe just Ninja Turtles movies, how they were always popping up out of the sewers. It was not my favorite experience and I'm glad I only had it once. 

The other interesting thing that we saw everywhere was what we called "the split pants children." If you saw a child under the age of 4, there would be a split in their pants right up the bum. So you were constantly seeing childrens bums just hanging out of their pants. And it was cold there!! It was about a week before I the correct usage of the split pants. A mother bent her arms at 90 degree angles and picked up the child so that he was almost sitting on her arms. She held his/her legs apart and the child would just…go. Anywhere. Who needs potty training when you have the split pants!?
 

 

The bathrooms in China were something that took a lot of getting used to, but made us believe we had plenty of stories to tell. That's the thing about being a World Racer: when you live in this close of community for this long, you feel like you can share the craziest things about your experiences in the bathroom, your bowels, your preferred squatty potty stance, and much more. I sincerely hope that when I return to the US, I remember that it is not considered polite conversation to tell someone that it has been 4 days since my last bowel movement. Oh goodness.