This isn't toilet humour. There's nothing funny about this loo!

Without wanting to state the obvious, it’s been ages since my last post/confession.
So many reasons, but only one valid; we’ve been away in Singapore and Malaysia for an eight day whirlwind trip.

It was fantastic and much needed. I was practically tearing myself out of my skin before we left, really desperate to get out of my house, state and country and in need of seeing something different.

It might come as a surprise for some of you who know how much I hate flying that I managed to go anywhere. I hate it so much my whole body shakes before and during a flight. I do fly, of course. How else am I to see the world? So I bought a book about conquering the fear of flying and it helped. I no longer shake. I just feel sick and dry mouthed. So I sat nine days ago on a plane, dry mouthed ready to experience something else, touching wood the whole time that I would make it there alive and not make news as a passenger in Australia’s biggest air disaster.

We arrived early into Changi airport after seven hours of quite unnaturally, flying through the air, where I couldn’t use my phone or my keycard to get money out. Turns out my global roaming hadn’t been turned on and my keycard didn’t work either. My cousin was late picking us up, so I felt very much stranded. Thankfully LSH’s card worked in the machine and my cousin arrived 15 minutes (that felt like an hour) later.

The rest of the trip really went by in a blur. A blur of colour, taste, excellent food, deep, rich spicy smells, great shopping, dodgy side streets in KL, fear of dysentery again in KL and some of the scariest toilets I have ever been to in my entire life.

The toilet thing is really a thing. It’s a very traumatic experience visiting a scary loo. Particularly for a woman. I even took a photo of one of the “bathrooms” I visited while on a bus from Singapore to KL that housed Asian toilets. Asian toilets in general freak me out. They are porcelain holes in the floor, which a woman has to crouch over and pee into. As a kid in Singapore I was traumatised by this concept and refused to go. I strongly believed, and still do, that I might fall in to the hole in the floor. My thighs are useless at the best of times, let alone when it comes to something important like hovering above a hole in the floor. Even with months of yoga behind me as an adult, I couldn’t see how I could manage it.

So, in some places, like this place, there are only one or two European toilets. You know, the ones where you just sit and don’t have to squat. I say it but I even hate the word squat. I don’t like to say squat and in fact rarely do. I don’t like seeing people squat. I certainly don’t like to squat. I am entirely unsure why. A couple of years ago, mind you, I couldn’t bring myself to say nipple. I couldn’t even hear it without it making my teeth grind. I’m over it now, though. So perhaps squat is the new nipple.  Just another idiosyncrasy to add to an ever growing pile of lunacy.

Anyway…I was in this “bathroom” in KL, and it was hideous. Dirt was on every inch of this room. Greasy cardboard lined the floors, the doors of the cubicle didn’t hang straight, and there was one European loo and it was all wet. Each cubicle is hosed down after each use, which kind of sounds great in theory, but the floors are always wet and I am a very suspicious person. There was a stench of waste that had been boiling in the 34 degree heat and it didn’t just waft by, it firmly rammed itself right up into the depths of my nostrils. It was all I could do not to gag.  If my bladder wasn’t ready to burst and I wasn’t reminded of the American woman who held her pee for so long in a ‘Win a Wii’ radio competition that she died, I would have waited until the hotel in KL, another three and a half hours away.

Instead, I held my breath, tried to look kindly at the people in the queue and asked in some crazy broken English, which was really me speaking English with a Malaysian accent, about the tall toilets. “You know, the tall ones, big toilets, off the ground? Where is that one?” Thankfully the attendant hired to rinse the cubicles out, but clearly not clean the bathroom, knew my persnickety kind and pointed me in the general direction of a loo. I breathed a sigh of relief that is until I opened the door of the loo and saw a seatless porcelain bowl.

“FARK” was pretty much my first thought. I thought of the woman that died and thought of my kidneys and shut my eyes, tight, while I teetered over the loo and held my pants around my knees so they wouldn’t touch the wet floor, while on tip toes so the bottoms of my shoes wouldn’t have to touch the floors either. It was practically a acrobatic feat. Trauma over, I went back to the bus, where LSH gave me a look that said his experience was equally disturbing. I felt comforted by this. I always know that if LSH thinks the same as me, I am not doing what I do best, which is over-reacting.

I am always very aware of my behaviour in other countries. I don’t want to be the tourist that everyone complains about, like when you watch Amazing Race and there is always an annoying couple who wonders why no-one in China speaks English. I don’t think I am half of that couple as I am, in the main, open to new things when overseas and aware of  everything being different/interesting. As one would expect the rest of the trip was more than marvelous and more than made up for the challenging latrines.

So traumatic I took a photo.