If variety is the spice of life, and you want to become a highly seasoned traveler, try seeking relief in the restrooms, public or private, of every country that you can.  You won’t be disappointed by the assortment of receptacles that the world has to offer for the purging of your bladder or bowels.  From the configuration of the bowl itself, to the flushing system, the world is full of surprises. 

I started out my life in the United States where these things are fairly uniform.  Basically, you have a porcelain bowl filled with water, and a solid porcelain or wooden seat, a water closet for flushing, and a chrome, wooden or porcelain handle for flushing.  The vast majority of the toilets are white, but you do occasionally run into pastel colors and sometimes even black or dark red, but other than the color, there is very little variation in the shape.  Some of the bowls are more elongated than others, some are higher, some are lower, but they are all basically the same, and the flush handle is always located in exactly the same place and operates in exactly the same manner.  Even the trademark of the leading toilet manufacturer is called “Standard.”

But things are not so standard all over this great sphere on which we live.  In Mexico, the toilets are very similar to the U.S. versions.  Except that a lot of them don’t have water closets.   I remember the first time I ran into a toilet without a water closet.  I was walking through the streets of my small town with some friends during the local patron saint’s festival.  We had been drinking some beers, so all needed to visit the toilet.  We stopped at another friend’s house and asked to use theirs.  We all waited in the patio while each of us took our turn in the bathroom.  When it was my turn, I noticed that the toilet hadn’t been flushed, but I was in a hurry, so I just went.  Afterward, I noticed that there was no handle.  I didn’t see any way to flush, which kind of grossed me out.  But, what could I do?  I went out and let the next guy in.  When we were all finished, one of the guys scooped up a bucket of water from a large water basin next to the pig sty in the patio and went to throw the water into the toilet bowl.  Problem solved.  After that, I ran into many of these manually flushing toilets, and became accustomed to them.

The one thing that I never did like about going to the bathroom in Mexico, was the fact that you can’t flush anything down the toilet other than what comes out of your body.  I mean, nothing.  Not even toilet paper.  Turns out, the old pipes are too narrow and rough to efficiently pass even the flimsiest toilet paper without getting stopped up.  So, every bathroom has a waste basket next to the toilet for the used toilet paper.  As you can imagine, the bathrooms get stinky really fast.  And you empty that waste basket on a very regular basis.  But what really got me was that, in most public places, and even at friends’ houses, most people didn’t use any kind of a bag to line that waste basket.  Gross!

I knew business owners in the U.S. who had Mexican workers, and they said they could never convince them that it was okay to flush toilet paper, no matter how much they begged them to do it, it still went into the waste basket.  I’m sure they were just looking out for the boss’s plumbing.

In Guatemala, I stayed for a couple of weeks with an indigenous family in a little mountain hamlet.  Their outhouse was clean, comfortable, and odor-free, although toilet paper was hard to come by, and they often used any available paper to serve that purpose.  But one day, I went down to the big city for a day, and found myself needing relief.  I was hours away from my little hamlet, so I had no choice but to seek out a public toilet, which I was dreading. 

The first culture shock about going to a public toilet in Guatemala, or in most countries outside the U.S. is that you have to pay to get in.  That’s just so… un-American.  Normally, I would refuse on principle, but hey, when ya’ gotta go, ya’ gotta go.  And the people who run the toilets have to make a living, too.  So, I paid my few cents to go in, and they handed me a square of toilet paper.  I waited my turn and finally got to go into the stall, shielded from prying eyes only by a sheet of woven cloth, kind of like the fitting rooms of some department stores. 

Much to my chagrin, the toilet was an oblong shaped basin with nothing even resembling a seat.  And indeed, no one appeared to have tried sitting down on it.  They must have straddled the thing and let the diarrhea fly from on high, because it was spattered all over.  I held my nose looking to see if I could see any way to flush the thing.  I could not (this was many years before my Mexican experience).  Suppressing the urge to gag, I turned on my heel and fled.  I had to wait another five hours to get back up the mountain to my clean and beloved outhouse.

Thailand was a very different experience.  The hotel I stayed in the first night had an American style toilet, but after that, we were staying in temples and sharing bathrooms with monks, and we got the real Thai McCoy... not the tourist version.  The toilets there are ceramic bowls embedded into the floor with corrugated foot-sized platforms on either side for… you guessed it… your feet.  You stand with your feet on either side of the bowl and squat while you do your business.  At first, I was a little doubtful about how it was going to work, but I soon came to prefer this style of toilet, and was always disappointed when I had to use a western style toilet.  The main advantage of the squat toilet, especially in public places, is that you never have to have physical contact with the toilet itself.  The only part of you that touches the toilet are the soles of your shoes.  I’ve also read that this position is great for preventing hemorrhoids and other ailments.  Wish I had one now. 

The squat toilets also have no water closets.  There is always a barrel of water next to the toilet (except when there’s a water shortage), and you scoop some up in a bucket and pour it down.  Sometimes it takes several tries.  It helps to pour it from at least shoulder height to give it more oompf, and to aim it directly at the hole.

Those buckets of free standing water can come in handy at times, I’ll tell you.  One time, I was in an internet café, and started getting those tell tale stomach cramps.  I asked if I could use the bathroom and was directed to a not-so-clean back room where I was grateful to see a squat toilet.  It wasn’t until after I had squatted and let out a Thai version of Montezuma’s Revenge that I realized there was no toilet paper (both in Mexico and Thailand, you usually have to carry your own).  I didn’t have any with me either.  So, I grabbed the bucket (which is really a small plastic bowl) and started splashing water.  I had to use my hands to finish the job, and use more water and then wash my hands really good.  Fortunately, I had some liquid hand sanitizer with me.  Then, with the heat, I just had to stand there for a few minutes, and I was completely dry, and no one was the wiser for it… um, until now, that is…

Well, on to Europe.  There are two main differences about European bathrooms.  One, is that you have to pay everywhere you go.  Even in the McDonald’s in Warsaw, you have to show your receipt in order to get into the bathroom.  And one thing that used to be true in Europe, but thankfully seems to be changing, is that if you had to pay to use the toilet, it was almost guaranteed to be disgustingly filthy.

The other difference I’ve noticed in European toilets is the flusher.  There are so many different ways to flush a toilet in Europe, and I’m sure I haven’t seen them all.  Sometimes, it takes me a while to figure out what I have to do.  A lot of the WC’s are raised high above the toilet.  In those cases, there’s usually a chain or a string to pull.  In the lower ones, I’ve never seen the same kind of handles that we have.  Many have a little knob directly on top of the WC that you have to pull up on.  Others have a knob in the same place that you have to push down on.  Often, these knobs are split into two parts by a sinuous crevice, making it look like the yin/yang symbol.  I have yet to figure out why.  A lot of public toilets have enormous, rectangular switches that you could push on with both of your hands.

The most disturbing trend in Europe, and I sure hope it doesn’t catch on, but unfortunately, my private toilet in boss lady’s house has this… a toilet that looks deceptively similar to an American style toilet, with one significant difference… the shape of the inside of the bowl.  You see, inside the bowl, there is a raised platform in the back half.  This raised platform has a small depression in it and is not covered by water.  Everything you deposit falls on this platform.  The depression is enough to hold both liquids and solids until you flush, and a powerful whoosh of water comes to efficiently sweep everything away.  And let me tell you, if you think your shit don’t stink, just try out one of these babies.  You won’t be under that impression for long!

Do all these oddities make me long to return to America and the toilets that I grew up with?  Not one bit.  You may find this hard to believe, but I now experience a bit of culture shock when I visit public toilets in America.  You see, other than that one bathroom in Guatemala, where the stall was only covered by a sheet of cloth, the U.S. is the only country in the world where such a lack of regard for privacy is displayed in the construction of the toilet stalls.  You know what I’m talking about.  The stall separators that are sometimes shorter than you, and leave a one foot gap above the floor so that little boys who have accompanied their mother into the toilet can crawl under and play peek-a-boo with you, and that huge gap, sometimes up to an inch wide, between the door and the wall panel, so that anyone standing outside can take a gander at what you’re doing.  Sometimes, the gap is so wide that you can’t even close the door.  How’s that for quality control?  In every other country I’ve been in, the walls of the stalls go all the way to the floor, and if they don’t go all the way to the ceiling, they are reasonably high.  And that gap?  Doesn’t exist.  Everything is closed up nice and tight.  It’s just so… civilized. 

Well, friends, I hope this little discourse has been as entertaining and educational for you as my travels have been for me.  If you know of any other variations on the topic, please do tell.