More Bathroom Adventures

Yes, after nearly 2 weeks of silence, I am blogging about nothing more substantive than bathrooms. In my defense, I'll say that I've been quite busy with evening activities, I've been making a concerted effort this week to update my languishing kids' blog (2 whole posts!!), and bathrooms are probably what a lot of you find most interesting anyway.

I'm also trying to make my posts shorter, as I think a lot of my procrastination on the blogging front is due to not wanting to start unless I have an hour or more to sacrifice, so I'm working (undoubtedly slowly) toward the paragraph here 'n' there format many other bloggers use. We'll see how that goes.

Anyway, while following some colleagues to the cafeteria a couple weeks ago, I discovered the teachers' bathroom. It's in the other building, and so requires a few minutes and the donning of a jacket (not that I'd leave the office--the literal one--without one anyway...it's still only in the 40s here), but it's nicer, provides toilet paper, and I won't set off a shrieking frenzy if I run into anyone else in there. It also seems to be heated, though this could just be the rising ambient temperatures of near-spring.

There are 4 stalls; 3 squatters, and the "handicapped" toilet. (It doesn't use the word, or any amusing substitute, just the ubiquitous stick wheelchair guy...or maybe it's a woman, since she's in the ladies' room) I don't know if it's gauche to use the handicapped facilities, but I've never caused a line, and my foreigner status gives me an almost-universal "get out of faux pas free" card.

I did actually take the plunge and try the squatters for 2 days last week. It wasn't that bad, just disorienting to have tp available in that posture. I don't have a problem with them, but am still preferentially gravitating to the western option. Interestingly, they're the first of their kind I've used (outside of Italy), meaning that if I hadn't chosen to use them, I would still have never been forced to.

Add to the list of brilliant ideas in use here: a plastic accordion door on the restroom stall. It thwacks into place via magnetic strip, and there's a hook & eye for busier bathrooms or paranoid people. It covers the entire opening (no "peep strips" on either side), and you don't have to maneuver around it. Brilliant!! (especially in airports--I had to explain repeatedly in the line at JFK that I was waiting for the handicapped stall because it was the only one I & all my luggage would fit into)

Not content with making my life easy, the bathroom sink has a lift lever similar to many in the US, but you lift to turn it OFF. I'm proving even denser with this than with the newer-style car window switches, which I did master after only a dozen or so times--I've yet to turn the sink off on the first try. Then there's the heat dryer, whose electric eye is back against the wall--you almost have to walk your fingers up the back to turn it on--but the heat comes out in the front. I thought for days that it was broken. Now I've learned you can only dry one hand at a time, while the other keeps the sensor active.

Last week at Riverdance (yes, Riverdance) at the Sejong Center, I offset the squat toilets with one of the most incredible bathrooms I've ever been in. Besides the giant lounge and the individual sinks (separated by mirrored partitions--Koreans do love a mirror), the toilet had a heated seat! A first for me! It also had a bunch of other buttons, but after an episode at the Dongbu education office where I pressed a random button and jumped back just in time to watch in both bemusement and mortification as a hose emerged and launched a fountain that hit the stall door and ran onto the floor, I didn't try any of the deluxe features at Sejong. They also had one of the increasingly common "jet dry" devices where you lower your hands between two plastic panels, then withdraw them slowly through a horizontal wall of moving air. It's kinda like the dryer at the car wash.

From my Canadian friend, on her now-"paroled" American boyfriend: "He kept saying 'restroom', which I thought was so weird. Is that an expression in America?"