Wipe or Wash? Toilet Paper or Water?
"Squat or sit?" is probably the biggest toilet question for international travelers, especially for Americans. That may be the case partly because Americans don't even know to ask this question:
What do the locals use, and therefore what will they provide for me: Toilet paper or water?
A bidet just like the one in Jim Morrison's room in l'Hôtel de Medicis in Paris.
Imagine that you are an American traveling overseas. You check into a hotel, only to discover that you don't have a shower or tub in your room. Nor is there one down the hallway.
You inquire at the desk about where you should take a shower, and the desk clerk is horrified that you should want to do such a thing. You are told that what you should do is rub dry tissue paper all over your body. That is the very best way of getting clean. Spraying water on your body would be a dirty practice!
My North American toilet and its roll of toilet paper.
OK, now you know how everyone else feels when they hear an American say that toilet paper is extremely clean but using water is a filthy practice.
Toilet with built-in bidet in Genova, Italy.
A bidet is a standalone fixture commonly found in France, as shown above.
The bidet functionality can be added to a toilet, as the unit seen at right.
High-tech Japanese toilet at the Tokyo Haneda Hotel.
But to really add functionality to a toilet, see the high-tech toilets of Japan, with their multi-paragraph instruction manuals explaining their operation on the bottom side of the lid.
Turkish train toilet with copper water line for cleaning.
A simpler water cleaning modification simply adds a valve and copper tube as seen on this Turkish 1st-class yataklı vagon, or sleeper car, on the Pamukkale Ekspresi train between İstanbul and Denizli.
Mavi House squat toilet with water spigot and standard red plastic bucket.
The Mavi House guesthouse, Sultanahmet district, İstanbul, Turkey, has a squat toilet with a water spigot and a small red bucket. For some reason the Turkish toilet buckets are almost always red.
To summarize the water-vs-paper situation:
North America —
Nothing but paper, except for the bidets of Quebec.
Europe —
Paper is provided (or, as you get further east, it isn't
provided but neither is water, they expect you to bring
your own paper).
However, water is preferred by many or most locals in
some countries such as
France
and
Italy.
Some times it's just a hose, as at Muhamed Aly Bedouin village, Dahab, Sinai Peninsula, Egypt.
Middle East —
In Turkey, toilet paper is only found in places
catering to tourists.
Beyond Turkey, I would be very surprised to find toilet paper.
It is expected that you will use water.
Asia —
It is expected that you will use water.
This leads to a further question:
If you are using paper, possibly paper from a personal supply:
Where do you put the used toilet paper:
in the toilet bowl or in the waste bin?
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. [....] Poor sanitation, bad hygiene, and unsafe water — usually unsafe because it has fecal particles in it — cause one in ten of the world's illnesses. [....] Diarrhea — nearly 90 percent of which is caused by fecally contaminated food or water — kills a child every fifteen seconds. The number of children who have died from diarrhea in the last decade [1998-2008] exceeds the total number of people killed by armed conflict since the Second World War.
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet, by Julie Horan, contends that civilization began with the toilet.
Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Laura Noren and Harvey Molotch, has essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and architects on the importance of the toilet, especially for urban dwellers.
Latrinae Et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World describes the toilets of the Roman Empire from Iberia to Syria, and from North Africa to Hadrian's Wall in Britannia.
Toilets, Bathtubs, Sinks, and Sewers: A History of the Bathroom, explains the history of personal cleanliness and hygiene to children in grades 5-8.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous Toilet of the World page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that I split it into categories, and the collection has grown ever since.
In December, 2010 I registered the toilet-guru.com domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
