You Don't Know What You've Got Til It's Gone

Cinderella sang it, and it's oh so true. You know something I don't give much thought to? Toilets. Yeah, I take those suckers for granted all the time...at least until I travel.

Now I see myself as a worldly gal, one who can pee in the most grungy of places (like on my shoe, or in that squat toilet in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia's train station that was sitting on a pile of broken tile forcing me to balance quite precariously whilst doing my business, or even the constantly clogged toilets at CBGB's where my friend, Jen, once dropped her make-up brush), but I'm not sure I was truly prepared for Thailand. Sure I was warned, but I figured that I survived China, and I really don't have a problem squatting (especially if I'm wearing a skirt), so it couldn't be THAT different...right?

Everything was fine to begin with... Then I went on a three-day trek through the mountains (though they call them hills around these parts) of Northern Thailand. The toilets there (and, to be fair, throughout the entire country) require much more participation the user's part than any other toilet I have encountered. The scarcity of bathrooms that you might find in a Starbuck's in suburban America (note: I did NOT say downtown San Francisco) led Diane and I to come up with a 5-point toilet rating system. Anytime you are paying for a toilet, you want it to be a 5, but that is rarely the case. The scale looks like so:

Western-style toilet: 1 point - Squat toilet: 0
Flushing toilet: 1 point - Manual flush (which is to say you dump water in the toilet to make it flush): 0
Toilet paper: 1 point
Sink with running water: 1 point
Soap: 1 point

If the bathroom smells rank, you can deduct half a point. Also, if there are towels, you can add a bonus point (though later on, we were forced to change the scale to be 6 points and include towels--more on that later).

Most hilltribe toilets were 2's...and were outdoors, thus forcing the user to walk barefoot in the dark should nature call in the middle of the night.

You can imagine my glee when I woke up in a hotel the night after we returned and realized that the toilet was just a few steps away...in the same room as me...and it flushed. It was like dying and going to heaven.

And then we went somewhere else, and the whole cycle started again.