Musings - Finding toilets
Bathrooms are not always easy to find and some you wish you never found in the first place.
You know as a parent especially and occasionally even for yourself, you find yourself desperately looking for a bathroom, somewhere you can legally allow your 5 year old to relieve themselves of the excess waste they might be carrying around. At home pretty easy, any gas station, fast food joint, heck any business will have something available in an emergency and they are usually fairly accommodating for a little girl with big doe eyes and an expression of "please mister". Nine times out of ten the bathroom made available for your needs is passable in varying degrees. They have those charts on the back of the door that broadcast how often and by whom the bathroom has been cleaned. These charts offer up some kind of solace, as if to say in a hidden message between the lines; you're okay to use this bathroom you won't catch anything that can kill you, evacuate with peace of mind.
This may seem a tad over-thought, even bordering on the ridiculous and you know I never thought of it this way either, not really, not until I had to find bathrooms in a pinch for said five year old in a country where bathrooms are more difficult to find. On a side note I have gotten way better remembering two things; 1) making sure we tinkle before we leave the apartment and 2) where the bathrooms are on route if it is a journey we have taken many times before.
Bathrooms in Hong Kong are available and can be found, true there are probably fewer bathrooms here then I may have been accustomed to back home but they are not such a rarity that one has to discreetly relieve themselves in say a department store plant (which I did see once). In various locations around the city and especially in the busier and older communities such as Central you'll eventually be compelled (by your bladder) to use one of the public toilets that are made available by the HKSAR. To say this is a service offered by the HKSAR is a stretch, only because of the conditions you might find them in. The UN might consider this a form of torture to have to squat in one of these.
If it had been me that had to go, I could have just said nope I'll hold it till I get home. I'm an adult I can do that (incidentally home was less then 5 minutes away). But as any five year old will attest to, when you gotta go you gotta go and so we went.
We descended the stairs from a street level corner, literally the sidewalk opened up much like a subway entrance, to the men's room which was evidently located under the intersection we had just crossed. If you are wondering if there was a matching women's facility on the other side, the answer is no, but this happens often in Hong Kong, the bathroom will be for one sex or the other, there is not always facilities for both. As we took each step I found myself contemplating how much worse it would be to let an "accident" happen versus using these particular facilities. While white tile was used in what one can only imagine as an effort to brighten up the place; maybe people won't notice this is a disgusting, forgotten toilet where only addicted heroine users crawl down to shoot up in a pinch. The walls were marred and dirty and as you pushed through the door into the actual facility the stench of five stalls in varying degrees of filth fills your nostrils with a punch to the lungs as you cough a little uncontrollably in an effort to push the foul odour from your being. But of course that doesn't work because one must breath to live and before you can turn around and exit you have already taken your second breath and you think to yourself "Let's get this over with already." and push forward.
We walked the length of the bathroom and as we peered into the empty stalls each one stared back at us in defiance with their squat toilets and the pipes seemed to snicker at as the water ran through them. The last stall would prove to be more familiar with a western toilet, but then I began to question the virtues of being able to squat and not have to sit on anything. How does a father teach his five year old daughter how to squat cleanly, isn't that more a job for mom? The struggle is real.
I did my best sterilize what I could with additional toilet paper (oh yeah, thank god for small miracles, this toilet had toilet paper) and then assisted Juliette with her task. Why is it this time that five year olds decide it is more important to discuss life's greatest issues, can it wait, can we finish please and get the heck out of here? Don't bother flushing, its time to go.
As she is dressing she notices an item on the floor and innocently asks what is that. To which I respond I don't know (really I'm thinking I don't care can we just leave this infernal cesspool). Often, and if you're a parent you'll have experienced this; I Don't Know is not enough. This led Juliette to examine the item she was curious about more closely and it was at that moment I realized she was looking at the heroine addicts discarded paraphernalia.
We rushed out of the bathroom, cockroaches scurrying from our path back to the light of day and Juliette could be heard saying, "We forgot to wash our hands!" I'm not sure that our hands would have been any cleaner had we stayed long enough to washed them.
