public restrooms

i've been to and used many public restrooms in china, but it was never a truly remarkable experience until this week, excepting the bathrooms in K trains, but that's because these bathrooms are on a moving vehicle, and you can see the tracks moving beneath you through the hole in the toilet. i've written about that before though.
i've used public restrooms in grocery stores, restaurants, train stations, airports, and tourist sites, and they all generally have the same characteristics in varying degrees: squatty potties (why can i think of no actual word for this at the moment??), there may or may not be toilet paper so bring your own tissue with you always to be safe, don't try to flush the toilet paper just put it in the trash can unless you want to make everything worse, usually the floor is wet so don't let your pants drag in whatever has been mopped all over the floor, and be prepared for a generally unpleasant smell. like i said, some restrooms are much better than others, but these are the things in general to be prepared for. usually using the bathroom is not a momentous occasion. it's just something that everyone needs to do.

however, when i was at the great wall yesterday in beijing, i had not one, but two momentous occasions. the first took place when we first arrived at the wall. we bought entrance tickets and some of us decided it would be good to use the bathroom before going up the wall, because who knows if there would be any bathrooms up there or not. so my friend and i entered the women's bathroom only to find that it was PACKED full of people. and not at all in the sense that there was a line going out the door. there are no such things as lines, except for groups of people that form in front of individual stalls, indicating that they are waiting for that particular stall. so along this row of stalls, there is basically just a mass of people standing all right next to each other in the general area that could be described as directly in front of the stall they decided to arbitrarily stand in line for. and somehow people were exiting those stalls and making their way out of the restroom. so there was basically a mass of women, trying to move in two directions at once and also stand still and wait. just getting into this mass was one thing. then choosing a stall and remaining stationary in the "line" in front of the stall was another thing. then standing there for 15 minutes with women on all sides pressing against us was another thing. then actually getting up to the front of the "line" for the stall without continually having someone cut in front of us was another thing. then getting inside the the stall and getting the door closed with all those people standing right next to the door--that had to happen to. getting inside the stall was a relief!! there was way more room in the stall than outside. so after all that, then apply the same general bathroom description i discussed above. then exit the stall, make our way against the flow through the mass of people and outside. yup. i have heard about how people don't wait in lines in bathrooms in china, but it has never been that much of an issue until now because i have never encountered so many people in a larger public restroom at once until now!

but, let me tell you, later i was glad i used the restroom then, before going up the wall, although at the time i questioned my sanity and almost decided to leave without even waiting in "line" because it was too ridiculous and i didn't actually really have to go to the bathroom at the time, it was just a good idea. after climbing the wall (which is another story in itself--climbing the wall on the portion where mao zedong walked during the national holiday week--bad idea), we walked back down through the tourist shopping area and were waiting for other people in our group. it was a sunny day, though not too hot (yay), but i had been drinking a lot to stay hydrated, plus i was feeling sick (catching a cold) so i figured it was good for me to drink plenty of liquids. so after all that, i did feel like i needed to use the bathroom. we saw one, and it did cost 5 mao (about 5 cents), but i figured, if it costs something to use this bathroom, anything will be better than the one we used before we went up through the entrance to the wall. clearly i was wrong. the price of a bathroom is not proportional in any way to its quality. i cannot speak about any correlation of the number of people that were in the bathroom either, since this is the only bathroom in china that i have ever had to pay for, and i did not even use it. because when i entered, i thought every stall was free, however, when i walked past each stall, they were all occupied, they simply did not have doors. i ever so briefly (really pretty much too briefly to be mentioned) considered my scale of desperateness for how much i actually needed to use the bathroom before an hour bus ride back to our hotel, and it was not nearly high enough to warrant even pausing in my stride, so i simply kept walking, except in the opposite direction, and found myself back outside, although with 5 mao missing, but that was a small price to pay to not have to use such a restroom. =) really, i have used many many different restrooms in my life, even those that were really just a hole in the ground surrounded by some walls, but all of these restrooms had one thing in common: a door. unless i went to the bathroom in the woods before while camping, but i don't recall, and that doesn't count since that is quite a different situations and there would probably be trees or bushes involved. however, after telling this story to someone else here in china, i learned that umbrellas are a useful and acceptable, even if not quite sufficient, substitute for a door, and i have stored this information in my mind, just in case, for future use.