child seat

a bathroom made for moms!Toilets here are usually fancy bidet toilets with control panels, fairly clean toilets with an automatic changing plastic cover (well, push a red button and new plastic cover comes out), dirty plain toilets or dirty squat toilets. This one, obviously, fell into the first category. Sort of mid-range in terms of how fancy it is.

How To

This is such a great article for those planning on doing some traveling.

How To Use a Squat Toilet
Frank Bures World Hum
The Situation: You’re sitting at a bar in the middle of Nigeria when you feel a rumble below your ribcage: the ominous tremors before the eruption. It’s the distant roar of a train coming down the intestinal tract. Ain’t nothing gonna stop it.
You look in your bag and see a cardboard tube that used to have white paper rolled around it, paper that suddenly seems to a have had a magical quality, paper that has been your friend and companion since you were a wee one, paper you learned how to use years ago, and which hasn’t been mentioned since.
But you’re a long way from Kansas and with no idea how people do it here sans paper. This is information that can be extremely hard to come by. It doesn’t come up at dinner. It’s about the last thing anyone wants to talk about at a bar. And it’s a little too weird to ask your host family about it. Besides, there wouldn’t be time for the conversation, even if you could figure out how to bring it up.
Now, of course, is the worst time to try to acquire this valuable bit of data. But now is when you usually start to think about it. Now is when you grasp the wonder of toilet paper. And now is when you realize you aren’t nearly as culturally immersed as you thought you were.
Now is when you wish you knew how to wipe like most people on the planet.

Background: Squatting is an ancient practice, but knowledge of it has recently been lost in the West. The flush toilet wasn’t even invented until 1596. And toilet paper didn’t become popular until the 1900s. According to the Toilet Paper Encyclopedia, pre-TP, humans used corn cobs, Sears Roebuck catalogs, mussel shells, newspaper, leaves, sand, hayballs, gompf sticks and the end of old anchor cables on ships. Ouch!
But the good folks at the TPE seem blissfully unaware that most of the world’s people still use neither toilet paper, nor western sit-down crappers. Nor do they use corn cobs, gompf sticks or anchor cables. Because, while most of us in North America and Europe sit, people on just about every other continent squat, using water and their left hand. In much of Africa and Asia you can be hard-pressed to find anything else besides the squatter.

Beginning Squatting: I called Doug Lansky, a traveler and travel writer who knows the hardships of squatting. “It’s difficult,” said Lansky, who edited a book called, There’s No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled.
“There aren’t any helpful directions, like a seatback pocket, that show you how to use a squat toilet. You have to sort of find your own technique, whether you’re up more on the balls of your feet, or whether you get a little more comfortable and put your heels down. And if you get advanced, you can even bring the newspaper in with you. That’s sort of the double black diamond mogul run of squatting.”
World Hum travel advice guru and Vagabonding author Rolf Potts has also seen a few squatters in his day. “In places like India, and many parts of Asia,” he told me, “a bathroom won’t have toilet paper. It will have a little cup of water. Basically, after you’ve done your business, you take your left hand and wash the exit hole of fecal matter, then wash your hand. That’s why nobody shakes hands with their left hand in most of Asia and the Middle East, because that’s your ass-wiping hand.”
Dr. Jane Wilson-Howarth is probably the world’s foremost expert on excretion, a real Buddha of Bowel Movements, and she’s not afraid to get into the details. “My technique when I’m teaching volunteers about to go abroad,” said the author of How to Shit Around the World from her UK office, “is that when you’re learning, you need to take everything off below your waist: socks, shoes, pants, underwear. Then squat over the toilet. Pour water over your bum, and with your left hand, just whittle away with your fingers and try to dislodge any lumpy bits while pouring water. And that’s actually not too unaesthetic, because any mess that goes onto your fingers comes off in the water.”

Advanced Squatting: Do above. Read The Wall Street Journal Asia.

What to do:
Most important: Cultivate the right mindset. Relax, pretend like you’ve been doing this for years. Remember, using your hand is (according Wilson-Howarth) actually more hygienic, not less, than using toilet paper. “You get good bacteriological cleaning with just rubbing your hands together with soap under running water four times,” she says, and cites a study which says you don’t even need soap. “It can be ash or mud, just rubbing your hands together under water with some kind of washing agent. Even dirt from the river bank will give you good bacteriological cleaning.”
In other words, the dirtiness is primarily in your mind, as Potts found out one day on the road. “I think it was when I was traveling through Southeast Asia that I eventually got caught out,” he told me, “and was forced into this mental power situation where I just willed myself to use the water. It was very strange. We’re not culturally conditioned to have that kind of intimacy with our butthole. So I just sort of had to—it’s sort of like riding a bike, or having sex for the first time—I just had to figure out what I was doing. Then, of course, I washed my hands extensively afterwards. But that’s when I realized it’s not that big of a deal.”
What not to do:
• Don’t ignore your pockets mid-squat. “Don’t lose your wallet, cell phone or passport,” cautioned Dean Visser, who has lived in Asia for more than 15 years. “If you do, chances are you’ll have to tell someone how it happened. I speak from hard-won experience, Little Grasshopper.”
• Don’t use glossy magazine pages. (See: Smearing)
• Don’t be afraid to ask questions. “It’s a difficult topic,” said Howarth-Wilson “Just because they’re embarrassed about it, people don’t even know where to have a shit sometimes, so they won’t ask where the right place is to defecate. They do a dump and run, then everyone is ending up encountering this stuff.”
• Don’t lean back too far.
• Don’t forget to pour a little water in, if it’s a porcelain/metal squatter, before you go, to help wash it all down afterward.

Preparation: It’s a good idea to get a few, er, dry runs in while still at home. Because with practice, you can get it down. After all, as Lanksy and others pointed out, we are biologically designed to squat. It’s the fine tuning we lack.
“The technique,” said Wilson-Howarth, “is to use a lot of water so you’re not actually scraping shit off your ass. What you’re doing is facilitating washing it off. But if you’re a learner at this, and you don’t take your bottoms off, it splashes onto your pants and you look as if you had an accident, and everyone laughs at you when you come out.”
Traveling benefits: Mastering the squatter will save you tons of heartache, stomachache, time, comfort and embarrassment. It works; it’s clean; and it will give you the fearlessness to travel anywhere.
Besides, you’ll never step out of the toilet in that Nigerian bar looking like you just stepped out of the shower.
* * * * * *
Frank Bures is no longer baffled by bidets, stumped by squatters or a prisoner of paper. He is free to go wherever, or however, the road takes him.

Toilets in Japan

Check out this apricot washlet and others in Toilets in Japan on Wikipedia.Quite the advertisement!

AND
Ancient Japanese toilet paper:

Ouch! Could you imagine the splinters?

There's a museum for everything!

Check out The Toilet Museum.
And example of a link I found on the site:

Queenstown, New Zealand Hotel Unzips Eye-opening New Loo
2005-10-18 Hong Kong's Peninsula Hotel and the Sofitel Melbourne often attract visitors from around the world who want to visit a loo with a spectacular view. Now Queenstown's newest hotel, Sofitel Queenstown, is joining that prestigious list with the most eye-opening male toilet of them all.
The second floor men's toilet, which services the complex's restaurants including Bezu and Fatz Cat, has been tastefully and aesthetically designed by the complex's developers Cam Marsh and Mark Perriam of Perron, and Brett Taylor of Group CDA. It features six unique individual 'stands' manufactured by Three Sixty Limited in Auckland.
But it's not the tasteful design or subtle lighting that has tongues wagging in the New Zealand resort town.
It is the six-metre long backdrop of life-size photographs featuring local models in varying poses directly behind each of the six stands - each with a full view of the action.
One has a tape measure out, one a pair of binoculars, another has a camera, a fourth is peering over her glasses and so the list goes on.
Queenstown photographer Sheena Haywood shot the images of models from local agency Ican -- after Auckland model agencies turned down the job when they heard where the images were going to be placed.
'We had a lot of fun with the shoot, made all the better for the fact that there weren't any men there when we did it,' said Sheena.
Queenstown Signs made up the huge posters which are protected (naturally enough) by a backlit glass wall, and there are plans to change the images on a regular basis.
'We were casting around for ideas with our Auckland creative agency Ideology to do something a bit different in the men's room when we hit on this,' said Perron Marketing Manager Peter Dallimore.
'The wall has only been in place for just over a fortnight and we've already had some very funny feedback. It's used by guests or visitors to restaurants and bars within the Sofitel complex.
'One guy said it was a bit disconcerting to be 'going about his business' and to have so many pairs of eyes watching him, a bit like the Mona Lisa effect. Others have called it 'hilarious' or say it makes them feel like going to the gym.'
Flush with success, Sofitel General Manager Mark Wilkinson said the men's 'loo art' had been a great talking point.
'It emulates the 'signature toilets' of some great hotel complexes around the world such as those in Hong Kong's Peninsula hotel, and the 35th floor toilets with an amazing wrap-around view in the Sofitel Melbourne.
'It's just a bit of fun and there have been big queues outside ever since word got out. We plan to change the look on a regular basis.'
Mr Wilkinson said he was now under pressure from those of the female persuasion to decorate the neighbouring women's toilets with something equally eye-catching.
'Christmas is coming so watch this space!' he said.