Ah, my dears. If you have never visited the Third World, you will probably never have seen a Turkish toilet.
It is just a hole in the ground, with two ceramic footholds on either side. You plant your feet on either side of the hole, and you squat, and –
Ahem.
It is, for an average American, difficult to welcome something like this into one’s daily life. It took me a while, god knows. But the body is very insistent about its own needs, and one does what one has to do.
At a Halloween party in Tunisia in 1985, a friend of mine dressed as a Turkish toilet. She put a big piece of cardboard around her neck, and glued a pair of flip-flops to it, one on each side of her head. See, her head was sticking out of the hole –
Ew.
I was lucky in both Morocco and Tunisia; my apartments in both had regular Western-style toilets. Nevertheless, one had to use Turkish toilets from time to time, in public places. One got used to them. One thought noble thoughts and did what one had to do.
Ew.
Once, in Morocco, I was attending a training session in a big old-fashioned school that didn’t have Western amenities. It was a warm afternoon, and I was going back to my room for something. Walking down the hall, I encountered a kitty-cat –
It wasn’t a kitty-cat. It had a long hairless tail. It was a rat.
It ran away from me. Don’t ask me why, but I ran after it. It ran straight into the bathroom, and I ran after it –
The last I saw of it, it was diving down the hole in one of the Turkish toilets.
Now: imagine how much I enjoyed using Turkish toilets after seeing something like that.
The only upside of this was telling people about it, and watching their faces, and knowing how they were going to feel whenever they used a Turkish toilet in future.
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