Toilets of the world

Need to do something light hearted after reading the suicide thread.

Cheryl points out that the AMTRAK toilets are a bit on the nose.

So here's a thread devoted to the world's most dreadful toilets.

Won't embarras anyone by which country.

Mine was on an oldish train with the hole in the floor toilets. For those of you who haven't travelled much, many Asian and European toilets don't come with a throne, it's just a hole with a porcelin surround which you squat over.

The sink had leaked everywhere and there was a good inch or two of water and who knows what on the floor. As I got my coat up out of the way (it's winter and three or four layers of clothes and coat) and bag sitting on shoulder the train swings violently and I have no choice but have to touch the wall (YUK) and water swishes up around with frantic grabs at coat to keep it up out of water. This continues for several minutes till I manage to get job done.

The next effort is to unlock knees to stand up. Again have to touch the walls. Moral of story - if you ever travel, first thing to pack is disinfectant wipes - one toilet adventure per packet!!

Travel broadens the horizons. Love it!

My daughter recently spent one month in India. She saw only one flush toilet the whole time they were there. She learned how to squat, LOL.

Ten years ago we stopped at a gas station in the middle of North Dakota. The toilet was ancient. It was square, and the toilet seat was square. I never saw that before.

Cheryl

Some of the rural wayside areas are the worst. Those that are pit-toilets...just no way for those things to be clean. ICKY!!!

Haven't had to fortune to travel outside the country so all I know are what I've found in the US.

In the 70s I used to go to festivals. The toilets would be a big pit with boards across and tins and a seat on top. You could sit there and look down on the glory below. After the first night it would be lit up by all the torches that had been dropped in.

These toilet blocks would be surrounded by walls made of a frame covered with green plastic sheeting. Inside the walls of the gents blocks were urinals made of rain guttering. In the morning the sun would rise behind the block and ... perhaps that's too much information.

John

Forty-three percent of the worlds population does not know what a toilet is. They do it like the bear in the woods or the lion on the pampa.

As for the train experience, the old trains running from Chicago in the 50's had a wooden box bench with a wooden seat and a hole in the floor. At least it was reasonably clean. My grandfather worked on the railroad and told me never to use the toilet when the train was in the station.

Back in the early days of trains, the porters used to put "Honey pots" under the executive cars and remove them just before the trains left. I don't think they were collecting honey!

Hal

Hal wrote:Back in the early days of trains, the porters used to put "Honey pots" under the executive cars and remove them just before the trains left. I don't think they were collecting honey!

Hal

This made me laugh. Around here there is a company called Honey Wagon. They look like giant milk trucks but that's not what they are carrying...or honey for that matter. It was featured on an episode of Dirty Jobs if anyone watches that.

I went to a campsite numerous times for their lax environment in regards to drinking, partying and late night hours. It was a fun time! I had some great experiences there, but none of which involved the toilets.

There were no showers there, only these holes with wooden planks. Yes, just holes in the ground. It was so bad..so stinky..so nasty that I swear you'd light a match and the whole place would blow up. There were signs above the sink saying "DO NOT DRINK THIS WATER. IF YOU DRINK THIS WATER, SEEK IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION!"

Needless to say, I was part of the 43% of the world who did it like a bear in the woods for multiple weekends during the summers I had went and was much happier doing it that way than visiting those bathrooms for sure!

Several years ago, my uncle put together a tour bus to go to Laughlin, Nevada. The bus picked people up at various places, like the mall, and people left their cars there for the weekend. Well, at one pickup, while the bus was waiting for everyone to get there, a bunch of us got off to have a smoke in the parking lot. It was nighttime. We looked back at the bus, and there, in all her glory, was a woman giving us a moon in the bathroom window! I don't think she realized the window, while of opaque glass, was still pretty visible to the outside. She had her shiny white booty hanging in the window for all the world to see

I wonder how many times that happened later while the bus was on the road.

I went for an interview somewhere up North that had great pride in the town toilets because they were automatic and cleaned themselves including the cubicle. It was a bit metal box with no widows, and when it came to getting out I couldn't work out how for a very long time. To top it the whole thing started to make a humming noise and starteds to vibrate. I had visions of having to avoid some big robotic mop and bucket or something and begun to panic. Eventually the door openned automaticly because i had spent too long inside, so if you still needed the time it could have been really embarrasing. I arrived to the interview somewhat harrased.

Di

I remember visiting my grandmother probaby 40 years ago and she had an outhouse in the back yard--the only toilet she had. She also kept a "chamber pot" under the bed. The outhouse smelled so bad that you tried to hold your breath while using it.

Also, how about those little portable blue outhouses that can be rented for events. Sometimes they're so nasty that it would probably be better to find a tree in the woods.

Thank goodness for indoor plumbing!

Becky

In my lifetime, I have seen men on the moon, the rise of the computer, the microwave oven ... so many wonderful technological advances. A few years ago I asked my Dad what was the greatest inventioin of the 20th century - so very many to choose from! Or so I thought.

Dad did not have to think. He immediately said "indoor plumbing - toilets and showers." He said they have saved more lives than all over medical advances of the 20th century.

I think my old man was pretty wise - thank goodness for the flush toilet and a hot shower. Imagine life without them! I have lived a week or so on a homestead in Alaska with no plumbing - man,o man was I happy to get home to my simple bathroom!

It's amazing that y'all can maintain such a lively sense of humor with all you endure. Thanks for the hilarity!

Chris

Chris,

We are just faking it. Pretty good, eh?

My personal worse toilet experience was in a homesteader's cabin in Delta Junction, Alaska. Snow three feet high, minus 30 degrees F (and close to -30 c.) and the outhouse was 50 feet away from the one room cabin my buddy had built.

He did not use the outhouse in these conditions. Mason jars for the front door and sheets of newspaper to throw inthe woodstove for the backdoor. Yuck to the max! I struggled through the snow to the outhouse myself ... only to find that certain items freeze into a large pile that cannot rot away in the winter ... magno yuck. One had to take a stick and knock down the frozen pile before using the facility ... and quite literally freezing one's backside off!

Thannk goodness for flush toilets!

Oh, Richard, what an awful experience, but I'm almost rolling on the floor with laughter.

Becky

It's hard to decide which one is the worst:

I was at an airshow at a Naval Air Base. I was stuck there for the whole day with family and they only had those portable toilets and it was summer and hot so we had to drink a lot of liquid. I waited in a long line for the toilet and when I opened the door and looked inside the "pile" was a little mountain way higher than the toilet seat. The hole they had dug under the thing had filled up. There was no way I could go in there. I just shut the door and walked away.

I went on a vacation to Mexico expecting every amenity we have here. I knew not to drink the water but I didn't think about the ice cubes or what they were using to wash the lettuce. So I wasn't feeling very well when we went on this long bus ride to Tulum, some ruins on the coast. There was a bathroom and it was just a hole in the floor and it was filthy but that wasn't the bad part. The bad part was I had no toilet paper and there was this little group of old women sitting on the ground outside the bathroom selling toilet paper 24 cents per square. I had enough money to buy a few squares and that was it. They had no sinks or soap of course.

I went with my new husband to visit his extended family back in Pennsylvania. These people live in the middle of nowhere out beyond where Amish people live. The just got indoor plumbing. When I went into the bathroom there was a lot of "stuff" in the toilet. There was all of this toilet paper laid out carefully on the back of the toilet. His grandmother explained to me that we are not supposed to flush the toilet until it gets full and we dry and reuse all of the toilet paper unless we have used it for a number 2.

Drying used toilet paper!!!!! argggg!!!!
Now that's when your really poor.

Yes they were poor but it mostly had to do with the fact that all their long lives they had used an outhouse with no toilet paper. They didn't understand the necessity of it. Plus it is coal mining country and their water comes out red and smelling strongly of sulfur. Its not something you can drink. So they don't smell "clean" anyway. I am from Seattle, WA where everything is sparkling green and clean so it was a dramatic shock to my system and we drove 30 miles to the nearest town over mostly gravel roads to go to the bathroom and get bottled water. In secret of course. It was still the 90s but I don't think anything has changed out there.

TOO MUCH INFORMATION

Did you ever convince them of the error of their ways? I purchased a small farm a number of years ago. It had a very small house with "home-grown" indoor plumbing. We lived there about three months and then started noticing some toilet paper on the side of the hill below the house. I found out that the septic tank was actually a 25 gallon drum buried just outside the bathroom window and a pipe that ran down the hill for the overflow. It cost us $3500 to have a proper septic tank and field put in.

The well water that we had when we first moved in was redish-brown. Oklahoma has red dirt. We had to bathe in it. It was like taking a mud bath, but at least you got clean. Well, you didn't smell like a goat. After using the well for about a month, the water cleared up and was ok to drink, but by then we had paid to have rural water piped in. It cost another $3500 for that.

Apparently, Oklahoma still has some strange ideas just outside of the city limits in farm country. This was in the late 90's.

Hal

No. No convincing them that reusing toilet paper wasn't ok. These rural people had all kinds of "different" ideas about standards of cleanliness. They got their drinking water from a spring in a ditch by a dairy farm. It had bugs and dirt in it. They left all of their leftovers out on the counter overnight for days, including turkey. Their entire kitchen sloped severely down into one corner because that is the room they used to bath in and it had a drain in that corner. It made it very awkward to walk and work in. Plus I got my first lesson in...woman do ALL of the work and men do nothing but sit and wait for the women to wait on them. Being raised in the Seattle area that was quite a shock to me too. My husband had to keep whispering to me what I was supposed to do and what I wasn't supposed to say.

I have many many interesting stories I tell about them. I had to go back there with my then husband several times. Usually in snowy winter. You could actually see the outside through holes in the walls where they had tried to shoot mice, rats, and squirrels in the walls. The heating for the entire two story home was in the living room. It was this weird little open gas flame burner thing that barely heated up that room let alone where we slept upstairs. There was ice on our covers in the morning. I had my baby with me and they set up an ancient crib. No way was I letting my baby sleep in that death trap and freeze to death. His Grandmothers house was actually her wedding present which was rolled down the street on logs and placed on their lot. Their town is just a crossroads of gravel roads. Amish men in buggies go past. His Grandmother had never been to the doctor or dentist. She didn't even know her grandparents or any other relatives because they had no photos or written records and life was so hard that they all died young including some of her own children. When we left the first time we drove to the town where her bank was and deposited enough money for her to get a bigger heater thing for her living room. What would be mansions here cost about $30,000 there and back in Seattle we were making $120,000 at the time but she wouldn't take any money from us. She'd never seen TV, a movie, a foreigner of any kind nobody but Caucasian people, left her town, driven a car, been in an airplane. She had two dresses in her closet that she made herself that she switch off wearing. All of the food they made was greasy bland (they never had any salt, pepper, or any other seasoning), and totally disgusting. The first thing I was supposed to eat there was a chopped up head of lettuce in a bowl with a jar of miracle whip in it. The only thing in their town besides a few houses were two churches, a First Methodist Church and a Methodist Church. I thought that was really funny. There was an empty decrepit old tractor store that hadn't been open for years and that was it. No type of any grocery. These people were so poor they didn't have horses either. It was all a new world to me. I got a good lesson in poor.

Living poor and rurally doesn't have to be unhealthy and miserable. I lived in the woods in an old cabin for a few years with no plumbing, commercial electricity, and very little money. But then I grew up in Los Angeles so I had been exposed to all sorts of ideas, cultures, and technologies.

Also my time in the woods I lived on the northern CA coast. Whereas it rains a lot in the winter it certainly doesn't get the super cold temperatures and snows of PA.

It is possible to have an outhouse that is pleasant, yes pleasant, and doesn't smell at all. We had one. It's a matter of managing it correctly. keeping the seats clean, and having plenty of toilet paper.

It's a hard life physically, living that primitively, but I loved being in the woods with all the nature. I wouldn't want to do it forever, but I'm glad I had the experience.

I think the big difference between my rural time and your in-laws in PA is that I did what I did by choice. It sounds like they are stuck, clinging to ideas that hurt them. It is possible to live fairly primitively but still live healthily and comfortably. However, it does take a willingness to be open to new ideas and be willing to change. It doesn't sound like they're quite ready.

Chris

Before my migraine I went to plenty of places with outhouses and compost toilets or just camping in the woods with no facilities. I live in Washington state where we have the most beautiful places to hike and camp. But when I'm in the woods here I know which leaves can be used as toilet paper if I don't have the actual thing and you cover and bury whatever you do.

My problem with dirty toilets is coming into contact with germs that made me extremely ill. I've never gotten sick from the most remote places in Washington. I've been to outhouses on the coast that are only maintained once a week or maybe once a month. I've even been to many filthy gas station bathrooms. But I got very sick in Pennsylvania and Mexico from the germs I'm not used to coming into contact with. The people who live there have a natural immunity. For example, my husband's father hadn't been home to PA in years but he could eat all of the stuff left on the counter and drink any water and use the used toilet paper and he didn't get sick. My husband just didn't go to the bathroom for a week. I was extremely ill for 2 weeks after both visits. I was so dehydrated my doctor wanted to put me in the hospital. To the people that live in these places that is their standard of cleanliness and its what they are used to. It is perfectly fine to them and I never said anything to them about it. I would consider it rude. I just handled whatever changes I had to make behind the scenes so to speak.

But as I've gotten older I have learned to always have wipes just in case. Mostly because I have a child and he won't sit on a dirty toilet seat because he thinks its gross. He's Autistic and very particular.