Re: Shanghai to Suzhou

Jasper Janssen said:

email hidden said:

One of the most wonderful things that China gives to an adult is the
ability to appreciate it when going to the bathroom and NOT getting
anything on your clothing. Very few adults know how to appreciate
that. For most of us the last time this was a big deal it was our
mothers who cared whether or not we dribbled or splashed.

Do they have the French-style hunker-down toilets there?

My worst toilet experience ever was with one of those on a train in
Turkey. The tracks were badly maintained, so every 2 seconds the train
jerked sideways by a little or a lot.

To date the two worst were the pig toilet and the cliff toilet.

The pig toilet was an unroofed squat toilet with half walls literally
by the side of the road. It was mounted directly over a pig pen. I
was doing my business as quickly as possible (what with it being
December) when I looked down and saw piggy looking up at me THROUGH THE
HOLE from about two feet away.

The cliff toilet was halfway up a mountain in Sichuan. I was spending
the night at a Buddhist monastery. I had to go a very very long
distance down an unlit half mud half ice path along a cliff with no
handrails to get to the bathroom. The squat toilets were off over the
edge of the cliff in a cantilevered wooden hut.

-M

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Quoted message said:

To date the two worst were the pig toilet and the cliff toilet.

The pig toilet was an unroofed squat toilet with half walls literally
by the side of the road. It was mounted directly over a pig pen. I
was doing my business as quickly as possible (what with it being
December) when I looked down and saw piggy looking up at me THROUGH THE
HOLE from about two feet away.

Your experience here was fairly close to mine, 21 years ago, on the
Chungjing-Chengdu highway. The bus I was on took a "rest stop" by the side
of the road. It was basically two boards over a large pit. You had one foot
on one board, the other on the other, and squatted, all of us bus patrons in
a row, making our contribution to Chinese agriculture. While we didn't have
the pig, we also didn't have the amenity of half walls, either.

ObBike Content: I rented a bike when I was in Yangshuo. At that time,
Yangshuo was not officially open to foreign tourism, but no one seemed to
mind me taking a boat down the Li River from Guilin. I rode all over the
countryside, where there are many mountains just like you see in old Chinese
paintings. Having the bike gave me the freedom to explore these.

I hear Yangshou is now "tourist friendly" with Pizza Huts and Starbucks --
say it ain't so!

--
Warm Regards,

Claire Petersky
Personal page: http://www.geocities.com/cpetersky/
See the books I've set free at:
http://bookcrossing.com/referral/Cpetersky