Toilets and things

Today I was researching destinations in Borneo and Lonely Planet’s Southeast Asia on a Shoestring guide said this:

For hotels, Chinese-run places are the cheapest, offering Spartan rooms. The showers and toilets (sometimes Asian-squat style) may be down the corridor but are usually clean. Ultrabudget options will only have a mandi (dip shower, ie bucket and water).”

Mandi means ‘to bathe’ in Malay, but I didn’t know the bucket shower is called the mandi. We have a mandi in our house, but only my grandfather uses it. We have the modern shower fitted for our room upstairs, but I must say that this bucket scoop culture is not going away.

I actually miss hearing my grandfather shower. The water goes chahhhhhhhhhhhh when it hits the concrete floor, and it’s a much more efficient way of having a shower.

If you go to 6:01 of Timothy De La Ghetto’s MTV Crib video, he introduces the bucket used in all Asian toilets and tells Asians not to pretend we don’t know what it is.

Closer to home in Greater Manchester, a shopping centre in Rochdale has introduced the squatting toilets to cater to the large Muslim community, as reported by BBC News.

You can take Ali out of the kampung, but you can’t take the kampung out of Ali.