Restroom, Lavatory, Powder room, The Loo, The Head, W.C., or Water Closet, Outhouse, Toilet, The John, The Crapper, Privy, Lavatory, The Can, Comfort Station, Latrine, Washroom, Cistern, or The Bogs...If ya gotta go, you're lookin' for one.
I was born in 1955. By age 6, I was out and about, exploring my world. This involved rails, snails and even puppy dog tails, not to mention widening my horizons in an ever-increasing radius around my home.
Boys will be boys, and boys, like girls, eventually have to pee. Most boys (and few girls) will just find a secluded spot and let it all hang out (or surreptitiously squat), nobody being the wiser (except nowadays you can be arrested for that). However, I was different. Many things had been hammered into my brain by my overbearing mother, at a very young age, and one of them was, "When you need to pee or poop, find a bathroom," lest you be labeled a heathen. Yep, my mother was a Southern Baptist, the worst kind of religious nutcase.
So, when I needed to ah...relieve myself, I'd go in search of a public bathroom, and I can assure you that in 1961 through at least 1978 and maybe a little beyond, there was no shortage of them.
Stop at a Rexall Drug store, the five-and-dime, a service station (that was the most common), a cafe, the local restaurant, a supermarket, doctor's office, a local factory, the local hardware store, or in emergencies, just knock on somebody's door and tell them you just really had to go, and people would allow you to enter their home to use their bathroom. This was a 'sensible' time.
Now things are different. Much, much different.
Knock on somebody's door and you're likely to get the door slammed in your face if they even open the door to begin with. Of course, if you're a kid, things are a bit different, but still, things are much different now...
Except in Asia.
While touring China back in 2001, there were bathrooms everywhere. They were open to everybody who needed them, and just like when I was a kid, you could find them at any place of business. All you had to do was ask. In Beijing it was easy. All you had to do was look for a sign that said, "W.C.," the British equivalent of Water Closet, or simply walk up to someone and say, "W.C.?" and you were all set. Elsewhere in China it's...
厕所 - cèsuŏ
I can't figure out a way to embed a sound file here for an example, so you're just gonna have to take my word for it when I say that for a Gringo American like me, it is practically impossible to pronounce without getting a charlie horse in your mouth. Oh, I eventually learned how to pronounce it while living in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, PRC, after literally months of practice. But, here's the thing...it was either learn to pronounce it, or pee my damn pants, since nobody in Guangzhou understands "W.C.," let alone a misguided pronunciation of cèsuŏ out of the mouth of a strange looking foreigner...namely me.
In China there were an absence of signs touting, "No Public Restrooms" or signs saying you had to buy something...be a paying customer in order to use their bathroom. However, even if there had been, I couldn't have read Mandarin anyway. But, in my experience, many places in Asia appear to be a couple steps behind the Industrialized West. So, it wasn't unlike when I was a kid and things were simpler back in the early 1960's.
When I vacationed in Beijing, instead of opting into an 'organized tour' with an agenda, I opted to just check into a hotel for four weeks, and go on the guided tours offered up by my hotel, the Xindadu, which was near the Beijing Zoo. In the lobby of the hotel they had a foreigner's "Tour Desk" with a pleasant, English speaking lady who would book tours for me at my leisure.
China tours are exhausting. They begin early in the early morning and stretch on well into the evening hours. On my 'Great Wall of China Tour' to Badaling (which is the most common destination and supposedly the easiest), the tour bus driver hammered on my door at something like 5:30 a.m. I had to scream to him, "Please come back in five minutes!" much to his disgust. He uttered something in Mandarin in an angry tone, which undoubtedly was something along the lines of 'lazy foreigners'.
That particular tour to the Great Wall of China began with me stepping onto the bus at 5:45 a.m., and not returning to my hotel until some time after dark.
In the tour bus I met other English speaking foreigners and we got to know each other pretty well over the course of some twelve-plus hours. By around one or two p.m., we had developed a coding system for the bathrooms we all sought out at our various stops. The 'Five Star Toilet Rating System' we called it.
A 1-star toilet was a dirty, grimy, bathroom or "WC" as literally everyone refers to in Beijing, which is British and stands for 'Water Closet". The 1-star's were not only dirty, they had no bidet, no toilet paper, and there were no stalls. Just a row of Asian squat toilets out in the open. Anybody could just turn to one side or another and see you taking a dump. However, being out in the open like that isn't the worst part of it. It's not having any way of cleaning your bum.
I'm proud to say I'd done my research online before traveling and had read the suggestion some previous Beijing tourist had made, "Bring a roll of your own toilet paper stuffed inside your purse or backpack." Heck, I should have packed twelve of them...I could have sold em' for twenty bucks a roll and people would have bought them. To this day I wonder how the others who didn't have rolls made out. They undoubtedly dipped their hands in the ever-present water buckets to slosh on themselves, since Asian squat toilets don't have flushing mechanisms. They are just a flat porcelain toilet even with the floor and to flush them you pour a bowl of water into them. Takes a bit of getting used to, but once you're past the 'ewww!' factor, then you're good.
Two-star toilets were the same as a 1-star except they usually had either a bidet or a roll of toilet paper. For you European-ignorant readers, a bidet is a French contraption adapted to toilets, creating a toilet "water shower" in which to clean your bum. They are very hygienic in comparison to other bum-cleaning methods.
or...
In Asia, you routinely see the little shower 'wand', similar to the one's installed on your kitchen sink and used to wash your dishes. In Europe, it is more common to see the one shown just above. However they are employed, they really manage to clean your bum well, so while in Asia, it was much appreciated to find them installed on the 2 or 3-star toilets.
The picture above depicts the difference in upgrades (In my humble foreigner opinion) from an Asian squat toilet (proposed to be more anatomically practical, which could have fooled me) to what we Westerner's are more used to...the 'sit down' Western Loo.
The tour bus crowd named a 3-star toilet as bordering on a high-class Asian squat toilet and a Western commode sans toilet paper or bidet. A 4-star was a Western toilet in a dilapidated restroom, which was unkempt, and a 5-star was the Western toilet in an immaculately clean restroom, with either toilet paper or bidet, and sometimes both. After all, if you use a bidet and don't have toilet paper to blot yourself with, you're gonna walk out of that loo with a big, dark wet spot on your ass.
But, I'm digressing here...
My point is simply that Asia is far ahead of us in regards to public restroom availability.
Here in the United States and especially in the larger cities, it can be a daunting process to find a bathroom when you need one. Get caught zipping around a corner and into an alleyway to take a leak, and in some cities you can get slapped with a stiff fine for public lewdness, or worse, be labeled a sex offender. Yes, it's true boys and girls, and if you don't believe me, Google it in regards to California.
Personally, I blame the homeless population.
I've been homeless...twice. Once in Los Angeles, and once in New York City. So, I know from experience. In Los Angeles they have these green, round, public restrooms on certain street corners that are automated and virtually all solid steel and stainless steel. They're virtually indestructible, so vagrants can't destroy them, which is what a lot of homeless vagrants seem to enjoy doing.
Every once in a while, the city workers come by, turn some switch on the things, which opens up the top, and they hit the inside with a high-pressure fire hose, cleaning them out and ridding them of that urine/poop odor, caused by vagrants who can't seem to hit a foot-wide hole for the life of themselves. But, while these bathrooms are fairly nice and handy, there weren't enough of them and in my experience, nine times out of ten you find them occupied.
New York City, as far as I know, doesn't have these things. The city does have public restrooms, but for the size of New York City, it surely is lacking. Besides, what public restrooms New York City does have, in many of the parks and other areas, I wouldn't use anyway due to the unsavory characters who hang around them. It's bad enough that as a walking pedestrian, getting places by foot or the occasional bus or subway train, you have to mentally plan ahead for those "I need to go" times.
By 'planning ahead' I mean hitting your bathroom in your own apartment several times before you leave, almost to the point of dehydration. Lest you get caught somewhere between Far Rockaway and Harlem on the "A" train, which is the longest running train in NYC, and all of a sudden ya gotta go. Reason being, if I leave Mott Avenue station in Far Rockaway and am on the A-train heading into say, Brooklyn, at the Jay Street-Metro station, and gotta find a bathroom, I have to leave the subway, which means I'd have to pay again to continue on farther, since once you leave the subway system, you've got only an hour before you've gotta pay again.
Planning ahead also means knowing where the bathrooms are located (and yes, dear friend, they've got an APP for that). No, not the one's where you've gotta buy something first, like Starbucks, but either public restrooms, or those rare gems located in a store or building where they don't seem to care if you walk in just to use their restroom.
When I was living in Los Angeles, I often used the bathroom at the Central Library on 5th Street and Grand. However, every single time I went into that bathroom, there was some homeless dude in there either bathing in the sinks, or making some sordid mess of the place. Parents were afraid to take their kids in there because these homeless assholes were typically mentally ill and some hostile.
It's behavior like that, which makes finding a bathroom to use all that more difficult. Places don't want their bathrooms trashed, so they either lock them and selectively give out the key, or require that you purchase something in order to use their facilities.
I don't really blame the businesses, but this is what causes me to post this article, "The Commode Conundrum," because it's a tricky deal when you've got to go. And at my age, with the batteries running low on my prostate gland, one minute I'm fine and the next I gotta go!
I don't know about the rest of you readers who are from the U.S., but I remember a time when it was a law that places of business were required to have a public bathroom, especially if they serve food & drink. I sit on the subway train in the mornings occasionally, watching some young dude guzzling a huge cup of java or smoothie and think, "How on earth does he hold all that liquid?"
Fresh prostate batteries, that's how...
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