It's come time to have "the talk."
About Indonesian bathrooms.
The attached picture is of the bathroom that I share with my younger sister, cousin, and any other family members or guests who come to visit for any length of time.
It is a really nice bathroom. Really nice. It's very Western, too--it has a sitting Western toilet and a Western shower fixture (the silver thing in the picture in case you couldn't tell).
Unless you go to a glitzy Jakarta mall, you will be hard pressed to find a bathroom in all of Indonesia that's outfitted for the use and disposal of toilet paper. Maybe you can see a white hose looking thing in this picture? It's next to the toilet for convenience--in some parts of the world people use toilet paper to clean themselves after using the bathroom, in Indonesia they use water. Just water. That pink basin thing in the picture? That's the more traditional water basin...from which water is scooped using what's called a "ciduk" (pronounced "chee-dook") to bathe or clean oneself after *ehhm* movements of any kind. So one can either venture to use what's essentially a bucket of water or use a water hose as substitute for toilet paper.
There is one drain in the bathroom, because in Indonesia, "wet is clean." So generally the floor of the bathroom is wet from the water basin or shower head.
Now to gross you out! Sewers in Indonesia are generally open, on the side of the street. From what I can gather, the drain in our bathroom goes straight to that sewage ditch--there's no treatment of any kind--so it's kind of like a hole to the outside. Worms and bugs will crawl up out of it into the bathroom, seeking shelter. And when it's really hot, the stench of sewage comes wafting into the bathroom, too.
Like I said, my bathroom is really nice. And it's very clean, too.
When I get a chance, I will take a picture of the bathroom at school. It is a much more traditional and "normal" Indonesian restroom. It's picture won't be cute and pink. It's picture will be dark because there's no light fixture in it--only shafts of sunlight.
I read somewhere that the trap has saved more lives than any other invention because it keeps the people inside the building from having to deal with the sewage outside of the building.
ReplyDelete