Bathroom experiences

My mom told me how they lived in a tent on Redwood road her in Salt Lake and had an outhouse where they used the sears catalog or corn cobs for you know what. During Christmas they got a case of oranges and apples wrapped in tissue paper so they got,,, yes you guessed it another treat instead of dried corn cobs. (yeakkkkk)

One of my earliest memories about toilets is having to go the bathroom in the middle of the night and finding my dad fast asleep on the toilet and I would have to wake him up so I could go since we only had one bathroom. I also remember on April fools day one time when I was about 12 I believe my mom woke me up at like 3AM and told me I was late for school and I had better take a bath quickly so I started the water running and then she started laughing and told me it was a joke. (hahahaha) Yes we only had a tub not a shower. I then remember the Deseret gym showers and bathrooms and of course the dreaded school restrooms. (most of the time I would wait until I got home because I did not feel they were very clean) Once in junior high I accidentally went into the girls restroom and started using the facilities and I wondered about the pink tile and why there were not any urinals and at about that same moment when I began wondering more girls came in and also started using the facilities. I stopped midstream and got out of there hoping that no one would see me.

When I was 15 I was in a band that toured Europe and when we stopped in Italy I had to use the bathroom so I went downstairs at the place we stopped at and went into the bathroom and closed the door. I was perplexed because I turned around in a full circle only to find yep "a hole" in the floor with a tap next too it and no paper. Needless to say I only used the hole for urinating and not anything else. I decided I could wait until we arrived at a more civilized place.

When we went to other places in Europe they actually had toilets and I learned you had to pay to use them. There would be a lady watching and sometimes she would even make her way into the restroom just to watch and make sure you did not make a mess. She also would charge extra for more paper. Many of the hotels did not have bathrooms or water closets in your rooms but you needed to go down the hall to use them or to shower. We were lucky in I believe France to have a toilet and shower in our room and the girls from the band that were staying in other rooms would come to use our bathroom because they did not have one.

In one of the hotels I saw what I thought were two toilets, low and behold, someone was nice enough to explain that the second fixture was not a toilet at all but a bidet (baday)fixture or type of sink intended for washing the genitalia, inner buttocks, and anus. ... Bidets are primarily used to wash and clean the genitalia, perineum, inner ... Bidets once served as a practical way for couples to prepare themselves before ... and the longer one (bidet nozzle) is designed for women to wash their vulvae. We were in Europe for a month and we stayed for a few days in the Belgium Army barracks and all the guys and the girls in the band shared the same bathrooms and showers so that was also a shock but the toilets had doors and were much better than a hole in the ground.

During scout camp outs I also experienced the outdoors in other ways using shovels and leaves and you really needed to be careful about the leaves you used.

When I joined the Army National Guard Military Police at the age of 17 I went to basic training in Alabama and we had more experiences with army life and they would inspect the toilets in the morning so we had 54 guys in the bay and only one toilet we could use because the cleaning crew would not let anyone into the clean toilets to save time on not having to clean them again. Later in the Army experiences in barracks such as Idaho, California and Utah we ended up having toilets all out in the open in the barracks with no doors or partitions at all so you would be sitting next one several other guys doing their business or reading the paper. (Ohhh gross) Since I did not drink I was the one that ended up cleaning up the vomit or putting a guy in the shower to clean up because if the Sargent would find a mess the entire platoon would get in hot water. I used to sing in the shower in the Army and some of the guys liked it and others would just tell me to shut up. I then stated singing in the laundry room when no one was there.

I went to Guatemala and ended up seeing toilets of various different types and many times women would just crouch down in the street and do their business and then stand up and be on their way. (The indigenous people) The first time I saw that I did not really know what I was seeing. They kept their long skirts around them and hopefully that has changed since I was there in 1983. I paid $15 dollars rent per month at the place I was staying and we shared a bathroom with lots of other people. It did have a toilet and a pipe that came out of the wall where we could shower with very cold water. I would soap myself up in the morning and then get up the courage and jump in to rinse off. I went back in 2008 and 2010 and the water situation was still the same (Cold) and my Mother in law would tell me when to shower because if the power went out you only had a certain amount of time before the water ran out so they would fill the rock sinks and any barrels that they had ready. I also remember one place we stayed at that had a toilet outhouse that emptied out over the side of mountain. (Super gross but that is the way is was done and in some cases is still done) I returned to the same place in 2008 and there were many more homes on the side of the mountain and still extreme poverty. This neighborhood is so dangerous that policemen don't even patrol there and taxis don't like to go into their area either. (Ciudad Real) When you get out of the car you don't waste time but get right into the house. Some of these homes require that you hike down several flights of cement and or dirt steps that have been cut into the mountain and much of the power that the homes are wired to is stolen and wired in such a way as to be very dangerous.

I got married to a Filipino(a) at the age of 22 and she explained that when she came to the states her first day she stood over the toilet and would flush it just to watch the water go down and she did that several times and was fascinated. Her experience with toilets in the Philippines was very similar to mine in Guatemala but for the most part they did not use toilet paper but water, soap and their hand. I guess that is why they use their other hand to eat with because they eat with their fingers much of the time by scooping up rice with there fingers and then grabbing a piece of chicken, fish or meat and then turning their hand over and pushing their food into their mouth using the thumb. This is still their custom depending on what you eat. I learned to love the culture, food and the people while married to my first wife. I was with her for almost 20 years and we were interacting with her family almost every week or several times a week since their families are much more close than most American families.

Over the years I have experienced many different types of toilets and bathrooms and being in different countries we see how other people live and I have been in very expensive hotels and very cheap hotels (one that was like $20 per night in China town where the room did not have a bathroom but the bathroom was shared with others on the same floor) So these are a few of my bathroom experiences.

This is what the hole in Italy looked like w/o the bucket of trash or paper