It's time we talked about bathrooms.
Once, sitting at a table of well traveled people, I heard someone say, "Oh, you've traveled a lot too. We should swap poop stories sometime."
It's true; the more you travel, the more awkward bathroom situations you find yourself in. I can tell you about my friend's moment of desperation squatting over a dirty toilet with no toilet paper in rural India when he opted to re-purpose a page from his passport; I can tell you about my vomit-and-poop-ridden 23rd birthday; I can tell you about the super efficient toilets of the Tokyo airport, about tribal outhouses in the mountains of Thailand, about not being able to find the flusher in several different situations, and about having to share slimy hostel bathrooms throughout Europe with the young, the smelly, the drunk and lusty.
But I'll spare you all the details.
Like many aspects of life in South Africa, toilets are a topic that come with racial, social, and political connotations. Access to sanitation is actually becoming such a divisive issue here that there have been a series of protests recently in which demonstrators dump human waste on or around politicians.
It's pretty disgusting, but it's hard to blame them, especially considering the numbers. Only about 60 percent of people in this country have a flush toilet in their home, according to 2011 census data. But here in the more affluent, urbanized Western Cape (the province where Cape Town is) that number jumps to almost 90 percent. It's another reminder that most experiences I have had in South Africa have been comparatively luxurious and pretty anomalous to the average South African lifestyle.
The facts are even harder to swallow when I consider that my toilet situation here has been pretty noteworthy. Having experienced my share of international commodes, I can say with some degree of certainty that Cape Town could well have some of the best bathrooms in the world.
From the moment I arrived in Cape Town I have been impressed. The cleanliness! The spaciousness! The privacy! The abundance of toilet paper--two ply! But the best part is the stalls. In the USA we get thinly walled cubicles that leave your feet exposed. The gaps between the doors are usually big enough for snotty little kids to stick their faces into. The locks only work occasionally. There's never a coat hook when you need one. In Austin once, I remember going into a bar restroom and having nothing but a translucent Texas Longhorns shower curtain to separate me and my bare butt from the rest of the world. Capetonians wouldn't put up with that. Most public restrooms stalls here are designed with a solid, floor-to-ceiling wall between you and the next person doing their business. The doors are both soundproof and smellproof and nary a lock is broken. They don't usually have paper towels, but the hand dryers are almost always the super efficient kind that blast air hard enough to blow the skin off your hands.
As is the case in the UK and in most former British colonies I've visited, the one drawback of the bathrooms here is the use of the two-spouted sink--one tap for icy, one tap for scalding--which, as far as I'm concerned is totally useless, but then, you can't have everything.
The bathrooms here have been so nice that I don't think I would have taken them for granted in the first place, but knowing how many South Africans are fighting for access to nicer toilets really puts things in perspective. I really had no idea South Africa's facilities would be such a glaring lesson in wealth divides for me in this country, but I did know before I arrived here that investigating the porcelain thrones of South Africa would be a high priority for me for a different reason.
You see, this is my first time in the Southern hemisphere and I've heard all my life about the reverse effects of gravity on the flow of toilet water down here.
Of course, as soon as I landed in Cape Town I totally forgot which way water flows in the Northern hemisphere. Can anyone help me out here? If you're on the top half of the globe right now, just do me a favor and go flush for me. I'm fairly sure I recall American toilets swirling counter clockwise, but now that I know that my South African toilet is distinctly clockwise flowing, that might just be wishful thinking. I do so want this myth to be true.
If anyone can confirm for me that it is true I will be unspeakably happy.
Once, sitting at a table of well traveled people, I heard someone say, "Oh, you've traveled a lot too. We should swap poop stories sometime."
It's true; the more you travel, the more awkward bathroom situations you find yourself in. I can tell you about my friend's moment of desperation squatting over a dirty toilet with no toilet paper in rural India when he opted to re-purpose a page from his passport; I can tell you about my vomit-and-poop-ridden 23rd birthday; I can tell you about the super efficient toilets of the Tokyo airport, about tribal outhouses in the mountains of Thailand, about not being able to find the flusher in several different situations, and about having to share slimy hostel bathrooms throughout Europe with the young, the smelly, the drunk and lusty.
But I'll spare you all the details.
Like many aspects of life in South Africa, toilets are a topic that come with racial, social, and political connotations. Access to sanitation is actually becoming such a divisive issue here that there have been a series of protests recently in which demonstrators dump human waste on or around politicians.
It's pretty disgusting, but it's hard to blame them, especially considering the numbers. Only about 60 percent of people in this country have a flush toilet in their home, according to 2011 census data. But here in the more affluent, urbanized Western Cape (the province where Cape Town is) that number jumps to almost 90 percent. It's another reminder that most experiences I have had in South Africa have been comparatively luxurious and pretty anomalous to the average South African lifestyle.
The facts are even harder to swallow when I consider that my toilet situation here has been pretty noteworthy. Having experienced my share of international commodes, I can say with some degree of certainty that Cape Town could well have some of the best bathrooms in the world.
From the moment I arrived in Cape Town I have been impressed. The cleanliness! The spaciousness! The privacy! The abundance of toilet paper--two ply! But the best part is the stalls. In the USA we get thinly walled cubicles that leave your feet exposed. The gaps between the doors are usually big enough for snotty little kids to stick their faces into. The locks only work occasionally. There's never a coat hook when you need one. In Austin once, I remember going into a bar restroom and having nothing but a translucent Texas Longhorns shower curtain to separate me and my bare butt from the rest of the world. Capetonians wouldn't put up with that. Most public restrooms stalls here are designed with a solid, floor-to-ceiling wall between you and the next person doing their business. The doors are both soundproof and smellproof and nary a lock is broken. They don't usually have paper towels, but the hand dryers are almost always the super efficient kind that blast air hard enough to blow the skin off your hands.
As is the case in the UK and in most former British colonies I've visited, the one drawback of the bathrooms here is the use of the two-spouted sink--one tap for icy, one tap for scalding--which, as far as I'm concerned is totally useless, but then, you can't have everything.
The bathrooms here have been so nice that I don't think I would have taken them for granted in the first place, but knowing how many South Africans are fighting for access to nicer toilets really puts things in perspective. I really had no idea South Africa's facilities would be such a glaring lesson in wealth divides for me in this country, but I did know before I arrived here that investigating the porcelain thrones of South Africa would be a high priority for me for a different reason.
You see, this is my first time in the Southern hemisphere and I've heard all my life about the reverse effects of gravity on the flow of toilet water down here.
(My journalism skills are really being put to use here, no?)
Of course, as soon as I landed in Cape Town I totally forgot which way water flows in the Northern hemisphere. Can anyone help me out here? If you're on the top half of the globe right now, just do me a favor and go flush for me. I'm fairly sure I recall American toilets swirling counter clockwise, but now that I know that my South African toilet is distinctly clockwise flowing, that might just be wishful thinking. I do so want this myth to be true.
If anyone can confirm for me that it is true I will be unspeakably happy.
Go figure! The Coriolis effect debunked! I got the same explanation from several sources
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File under "News to Me": you know that old story about how northern hemisphere toilets flush counter-clockwise, and southern hemisphere toilets (and buckets, drains, and such) flush clockwise, due to the Coriolis effect? It's bogus! Today I learned that while the Coriolis effect is significant for hurricanes, it's not strong enough to make toilets flush in different directions at different points on the Earth. The real cause of "backwards"-flushing toilets is just that the water jets point in the opposite direction. Mind blown. (Mind blown even more because this was the inciting event on a Simpsons episode, and everybody knows cartoons are never wrong.)
Maybe I should move to SA so that I wouldn't have nightmares about public toilets.
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