I haven’t written much about toilets lately. How remiss of me! Ours have been, for the most part, working pretty well so it hasn’t come to my attention. I still long for the glorious MP3-playing Toto toilet, but if the toilet flushes… Anyway, I was reading a post on a new toilet called the Uni-Pee, a unisex toilet that is a cross between a conventional toilet and a urinal (imagine if they got married and had a baby toilet – it’d be a Uni-Pee!). Anyway, I became mildly curious about what would happen if I typed the word “toilets” into Google. Well lo and behold if the first hit on the page wasn’t Toilets of the World, a fascinating pictorial journey of – you guessed it – toilets from around the world. Some of them were quite disgusting, but others brought back fond memories of trips I have taken and toilets I have seen and used.

My most memorable toilet experience was in Nepal – I was hiking in Everest National Park, a pretty remote part of the world, and not a place where you will run into many Toto toilets or really toilets of any kind. The more typical way to go was on the side of the road in the bushes (if there were any bushes – at higher elevations you were, so to speak, shit out of luck). This particular toilet was an outhouse built precariously on the side of a hill. Most of the outhouse was perched on the top, but the backside hung over the edge of the hill, on which grazed a couple of fat pigs. I went in to use the facility, and heard some gawd awful rooting around below me – yes, it was the pigs waiting to snack on any, uh, deposits I might be making. Now THAT was disgusting.

Another memorable experience was in St. Petersburg, Russia. To this day if I want to gross out my friend Cheryl (who went on that trip with me), all I have to say is, “Remember that toilet in Russia…” and she moans and covers her eyes. This toilet was in a train station. I really had to go, as did Cheryl, so we headed over to the bathroom when we saw the sign for a public restroom. Inside was…nothing. no stalls, no toilets, no toilet paper, just an old babushka collecting rubles and several holes in the ground. Not your average holes in the ground, porcelain holes in the ground with – get this – foot pads!! Yes, it was two Westerners’ abrupt introduction to the squat toilet. These squat toilets were pretty old and clearly had been used by people with less than perfect aim as indicated by the evidence on the rims and footpads. Cheryl took one sniff & look & fled; I decided when in Rome, and joined my fellow squatters. Not the prettiest toilet I’ve ever used, but one of the most interesting – and when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Let me wrap this up with a final link to the latest and greatest European toilet designs. The square ones are a puzzle – it just doesn’t seem like the average butt would fit on that seat very well.