Okay, I just have to do this post as this has been on my mind. You see, I have been trying to get things away that we brought home from China. One of the things that we had bought were a pair of split pants. Elspeth would have been wearing split pants in her orphange. If you have never seen split pants you can look at the photo below. Basically, when a kid needs to go they crouch and go. When we were in Nanchang you would often see kids go right there on the street. Their parent or caregiver would stop, wait for them to finish and then clean it up. In Beijing, you would see parents holding their child over the garbage can so that they could do there business. Now if you have ever potty trained a child you know how frustrating it can be when they have to go and you don’t know where the toilets are. From toilet training Katrine I learned where the bathrooms were in grocery stores, drugstores, heck even the teacher’s store. If you have a boy you can walk them to a bush and it is socially acceptable, well tolerated, for them to pee and then go back to playing. Maybe all of us who have to toilet train girls have something to learn from these pants.
Anyways, then I got to thinking about all of the different types of bathrooms and signage that we’ve seen. Totally not Canadian. Once you get the hang of squats they are not too bad…if you pretend that any liquid on the ground is simply water from the floor being washed. I think our most interesting visit to a squat on this trip was when the ducks who were eating beside the path to the squat tried to follow us inside. Have you ever tried to shoo away a duck while needing to pee at the same time? I hadn’t until this trip. I also particularly liked the small pot the hotel gave us when we asked for a potty (just in case). Now granted, the hotel actually had a potty where here it is definetely BYOP. But really, can you imagine trying to sit or even squat over that thing…especially when you are Elspeth’s size?
