Bathrooms

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Bathrooms in India man, holy crap.

 

The ones set up in cities you have to pay to use, and even so, they are NOT pretty places.  They’re something along the lines of ten cents to get into, and then you walk in, open and lock the door behind you, and then move the rock from over the hole in the floor and just go at it.  If you have to go #2, you just hike your skirt-thing up and squat over the hole and hope for the best.  Usually that’s how you urinate too if you have to, though I never did that.  I thought it was a little too weird for me.

 

Then when you’re done, like I said, there’s no toilet paper.  I brought some in my backpack just in case though.  Usually you just wash your hand in this big concrete pool of running water that they have in the public part of the bathroom.

 

A lot of times, though, people don’t even use bathrooms.  Like I said earlier, they just pull over on the road, get off their bike, take two steps from the road and go for it.  And if they have to do anything else, they just find a bridge or a riverbank or a place they feel is appropriate and go for that too.  And on the trains, it just goes onto the tracks.  So yeah, there’s basically no sewage system at all in India.  In the cities, it gets incredibly smelly.  Sometimes you’ll walk over a bridge and you’ll literally just be overwhelmed with the smell of human crap, and you have to breathe into your shirt for a minute and quicken your pace to get away from it.  It’s pretty gross, but it’s not the people’s fault, really, and what the hell else are they going to do?