Toilet tales

Our hotel in the capitol city has crazy toilets that must be cousins to the fancy tap-dancing toilet my Japanese host family had when I visited in middle school on a sister city exchange program.










There is a giant console of buttons next to it, prepared to instruct the toilet to spray water, blow warm air, deodorize, or heat the seat.

In Japan, however, the fancy toilet was not labeled in English, and I could never keep track of which buttons did what.  It felt as if little Japanese elves came in the night and reprogrammed all the buttons.  The toilet was so fabulous that it was the first thing I wanted to show my friend (who was not quite believing my toilet trouble because her host family had a regular boring toilet) when she visited my house.  So there we were, two middle school girls, giggling together in the bathroom, pressing buttons on the toilet--which no one was actually sitting on.  Turns out this is a problem because water sprayed out of the toilet, across the bathroom, out the door, and onto the stairs!  The one here even has a heated seat.  A fellow traveler confessed at dinner the first evening that she considered skipping a shopping trip with our guide to replace her lost camera, just so she could play with the toilet.  ;)

When you travel, even the bathroom can be a "learning and discovery" adventure!  Today, we headed out away from the city, stopping for snacks at a convenience store along the highway.  I asked our guide if there was a restroom, and--with a twinkle in his eye--he said, "Come with me.  I'll show you."  We walked to the door of the store, and he pointed to a leaning shack maybe 15 meters away.  "Go learn and discover," he said, barely hiding his smirk.  Recognizing this as a challenge, I walked over and discovered that not only was the shack leaning, it also had no door.  Actually, this turned out to be a good thing because the "toilet" consisted of a set of two boards--one for each foot to stand on--and a very shallow hole in between.  The lack of door allowed a good breeze to pass through, making it less stinky than most of our plastic port-a-potties in the U.S.  I was also thankful that the door-less opening was pointed away from the highway you can see in the background of this photo.

When I returned, our guide was eager for my reaction.  "No heated seat!" I said.