Squatties and Showers

I mentioned in a previous post that our Bangalore apartment had two bathrooms - one western and one squatty. In this post I intend to give you more information than you could ever ask for or expect about the Asian bathroom experience. Lets get right to it!

What is a squatty, you ask? It is just what it sounds like. It is an Asian porcelain throne. It is on the floor and to be mounted with both feet flanking each side of said toilet - then assume the position the name suggests. This type of toilet is recommended for young people and Asians.  By the way, ours happened to be mauve in color. In that bathroom there was a low faucet and shower head and a bucket. Since toilet paper is not commonly used, every bathroom is equipped with a faucet intended for clean up following use. There was a sink and our clothes washing machine in this bathroom, too.  There was no hot water in this bathroom. We primarily used this space for laundry.  As in all bathrooms, the single window was always left open, inviting all local mosquitoes to party there.

A western toilet is more like the toilets we have in the US. Most "westerners" prefer using them. I have heard that some Asians are so opposed to sitting on one that they will assume the squatty position on western toilets when visiting the US.

There was a small pedestal sink tucked away in the hall - also mauve. This is where I brushed my teeth. There is a process for brushing teeth, too...get water bottle with clean water, wet toothbrush with bottled water, add toothpaste and brush, spit,repeat, rinse mouth with bottled water, wash off toothbrush with bottled water - bend down and turn on water faucet below sink, rinse sink, turn water flow off below sink. Whew! The hardest part is remembering to not rinse in sink water!


Come take a shower with me - well, not literally but let me tell you about it. To shower - turn on the geezer and wait 15 minutes for hot water. A geezer is a small hot water tank
that is mounted up high in the bathroom.  There is usually a switch like a light switch you click to "on".
Take only what is necessary into the bathroom with you - as little clothes as possible and your towel and washcloth. To go into the bathroom, you must slide the deadbolt on the outside of the door and turn on the light from the outside. When you get in, you slide the deadbolt on the inside  of the door. 

The shower is not in a stall - it is in the end of the bathroom. Close the lid of the toilet. After taking care to put your dry clothes, towel and the toilet paper as far away as you can get them, pull extremely hard on the handle of the shower to open it. (Be thankful your son-in-law rigged the shower head up high with a coat hanger or you would be sitting on a low stool or holding it in your hand while showering with no place to put it). Begin adjusting the hot and cold water and hope for a good water flow and that it holds up at least until you get the soap out of your hair. Shower as normal while standing next to an open window through which mosquitoes feel free to come and go and you can hear all the neighborhood daily business going on. When your shower is over and the water has been turned off, you squeegee the floor with squeegee that is always provided. Remember to turn off the geezer unless someone is following you.  You try to find a dry place to towel off, gather your things and exit. Deadbolt the outside again and turn off the light. Go some place to dry off better and dress for the day.

Mommy's have it harder while bathing the children.  There is a little tub for bathing them

Swinging my hair beneath the ceiling fan with little man and his best friend Froggy helping was my preferred way to dry my hair!

Gadgets and Practical Living

Our dwelling place in Bangalore was an apartment that Chase and Lacey rented for their two and half month stay.  It belongs to a family of four who live on the second floor and the father's aunt lives on the top floor.  Multiple family homes are the norm there.  Many people buy or build their home with the intention of having income property.  This makes for very interesting hardware found on odd doors - both inside and out. 

Now I am not talking about just outside doors, I am talking about all doors. In our apartment we had huge ancient looking hardware.  Each door has a deadbolt in the middle on the top and on the bottom on the outside of the door and each one has a deadbolt in the middle on the top and on the bottom on the inside of the door.

The rental that where we lived was on the first floor.  First floor windows are barred from the inside - the bars are permanently installed and there is no way out or in through them.  The glass in the windows is frosted.  To get fresh air or let in your daily dose of mosquitoes, you would push the window open through the bars and hook them to close them (or go outside and push them shut as I had to do sometimes).  With the two extra outside doors padlocked from the inside and no key available and the bars on the windows, there was no alternative escape route besides the front door.  If someone chose, they could throw the deadbolt on the outside of the front door and ...well, you get the picture.  As far as fire hazards, the walls are all concrete and metal so there isn't much to burn.

We enjoyed a sunken living room, dining area, good size kitchen, two bedrooms and two bathrooms (one of them a squatty and one western).  The floors are all marble tile.  This is very condusive to Indian living.  They aren't spectacular but practical.  We had two girls who would come in three times a week and sweep and mop the floors and clean the bathrooms.  With a great flurry, they quickly moved through the house in their saris with their asian style brooms and a mop and bucket, finishing their work in under 30 minutes.  For this they received 1000 rupees each month (approx $20).  It was remarkable how much dirt and dust were on the floor in just two days time!

The kitchen became my domain.  Everyone needs purpose - to be loved, wanted and needed - and I am no different.  I saw quickly that my presence in the kitchen would be welcome.  We were fairly well equipt for a rental place and made do with what we had in a pinch.  The stove and oven were gas and ran off of a tank.  I enjoyed cooking with gas - it has been a while.  We had a microwave, large fridge/freezer, water cooler, and the portable clothesdryer was in the kitchen.  The outlets were used for multiple appliances and so we had to plan well for maximum use.  We had a toaster, hot pot and bottle steralizer that we had to juggle, along with the microwave and sometimes the clothes dryer. 

The biggest obstacle in cooking and cleaning is the water.  There is no running hot water in the kitchen and the water that comes from the faucet is not injestable.  Although most westerners living there have adapted and don't mind washing their dishes in cold water and then waiting for them to completely dry before using them, I just couldn't do it.  I developed a process.  I would boil water while I washed the dishes by filling the largest bowl or cup that I had with water and dish soap.  I washed everything with that water, as much as possible, refilling as needed. (Water conservation is more important there and so you don't leave the water running).  I would then rinse them in cold water to remove the soap.  I would set everything in the sink side by side that would hold water and pour the boiling water in.  When everything had been rinsed with boiling water, I would put them on the counter to dry. With cooking, you had to constantly be thinking about the unsafe water.  We would wash vegetables and fruits in bottled water with a grapeseed extract to kill the nasties on the peels.  We would wash vegetables that would be cooked in sink water to get dirt off and we would used bottled water to actually cook with.  Alll drinking water came from the cooler. Yes, it is a process just to get clean, safe food.

The clothes washer was in the squatty bathroom.  It took forever to fill so we began filling it with a bucket - much more time efficient.  The dryer was in the kitchen.  Most often we would wait until the evening to use it because it took up the kitchen space and had to share an outlet with our other countertop appliances.  It also heated up the kitchen and so we waited to push it across the room and stretch the hose across the sink and vent it out the window until later.  We also utilized a drying rack quite a bit.  We had great ceiling fans and the clothes dried fairly quickly.

When Ajay was snuggled all safe in his bed, we would relax and play a game or watch a movie from the selection some friends had loaned us.

About 10:00 am, exhausted from the day, we would say good-nights and I love yous and turn out the lights.  Anyone have a guess how to do that?

Squatty talk, how to shower and how to brush your teeth - next post!

Wal-Mart...Asian Style!

I arrived at our temporary dwelling in Bangalore, India in the early morning hours.  I had slept some and rested quite well for the two days that I had spent on the plane.  I was excited about being there and getting reaquainted with my almost two year old grandson and wild horses could not have dragged me to bed! 

Lacey needed to go grocery shopping and I was game - not wanting to miss a thing! We walked down the street and I began experiencing life as I would know it for the next 5 weeks.  I was very time disoriented and I suppose also in somewhat of culture shock.  I remember it as though looking through a frosted glass or maybe a dream.  I could hear Lacey talking and was responding appropriately (I think), but the flood of unfamiliar street noises and snapshots of visually stimulating scenes overtook my senses. 

She stood at the edge of the street, very pregnant and vulnerable, raised her hand slightly and spoke, "Auto".  I stood behind her feeling a little inhibited and watched as she negotiated our transportation in one of the local automatic rickshaws.  When she and the driver had agreed, she quickly moved to get into the back seat and I just followed without question.  I was tired, but I didn't want to miss a thing.  Riding in this golf-cart like vehicle through the roads in unbelievable traffic should have been daunting, but instead it was fascinating.  My eyes could not behold enough.  Who would have ever thought that I could be speechless and in sensory overload? 

Lacey explained to me that we were going to the Wal-Mart store, Easy Day.  Now, during her globe-trotting she has often called stores a "Wal-Mart store", when they were not, indeed, but were a place that many things could be purchased under one roof.  When we got to the store, I was surprised to see the Wal-Mart blue and the gold colored tear-drop shaped icon seen on many Wal-Mart stores in the US. The store carried many US brands and even Great Value.  I'm not sure of their true association, but this was an Asian Wal-Mart. 

We entered on the ground level, with the traditional security personel standing guard by the front door - no nice lady with a bird on her shoulder greeting us (for Batesville resident's pleasure).  This was the produce level.  Lacey knew she had some packaged products to buy and even some everyday department store needs, so we went to the second floor.  We wheeled our basket to the moving escalator/cart carrier and went to the second floor.  Here we found everything from linens and baskets to toys, cleaning products and canned goods.  We spent some time just looking to see what was available.  She chose some shelf products such as boxed cereal and a few canned goods.

It was time to go back to the main floor and purchase produce, look at the frozen foods, and see what meat we might find.  We passed the large barrels of every kind of rice and lentels on the planet as we made our way back to the escalator.  It was tempting just to stop and run my fingers through them - such a tactilly pleasing temptation!! When we got back to the first level we went to the refrigerated/frozen foods.  Here we found yogurt, butter, frozen peas and corn.  Lacey was excited about the cheese - cheddar, mozerella and even cream cheese, a luxury they don't have in their home land.  We bypassed the mutton hotdogs and chicken sausage.  We wheeled around to the very tiny, limited supply meat counter.  There was chicken - a lot of skinny, dried out looking chicken.  There was mutton - not very appealing and poorly butchered mutton.  There was absolutely no beef.  We were done quickly there.

Finally we began looking at the produce.  It was beautiful and very aesthetically attractive.  There were many items that we didn't know what were and didn't know how to buy.  We chose garlic, small red onions, a few potatoes, and green and chili peppers.  We took them to the counter to be weighed and priced (like they do deli meat in the US).  Our basket was full and it was time to check out.

We got into the long line and waited our turn.  At that moment it hit me - we had to get all of this stuff home somehow.  We had to carry it, hail a rickshaw, make a deal and put it in the rickshaw quickly.  It would be a challenge - a very pregnant young white woman and an older American woman with her foot in a boot, carrying a cane, standing beside the road with multiple bags of groceries trying to make a deal with a rickshaw driver!  It was not long until I saw how wrong that scenerio was.  In India, grocery bags are amazingly strong and very nice.  The catch is, you pay for them.  The cashier had misunderstood Lacey and thought we wanted ALL of the groceries in two bags so at the end of check out, we had two very large bags crammed full of groceries!  We had to manage carrying them out by ourselves!  Lacey is resourceful and she took the cart out with us and we stood by the roadside, looking pitiful.

I was so grateful when a rickshaw driver took pity on us and decided to give us a ride on Lacey's conditions.  He helped load the groceries into the back of the rickshaw and took us to our door, where Chase was waiting to help unload.  By this time, I was very tired and ready to rest!  I was also grateful for our Wal-Mart at home and personal transportation that we often take for granted.

Bangalore, India or Bust!

On December 5, 2012, the day before my 56th birthday, I said good-bye to my family and friends and America as I boarded a plane in Little Rock, Arkansas with India as my final destination.  I was carrying a heavy backpack and sporting a corrective boot and cane.  I checked three bags, all at or near capacity, full of goodies and gifts for our overseas children.  Due to my incapacity, my amazing husband had ordered full wheelchair access in airports across the globe.  It was a total life-saver for me!

At check-in, I agreed to walk to my first gate in the Little Rock airport due to the size of the airport and nearness of the gate.  From that moment on, I was met with a wheelchair and ushered around like royalty.  When my plane landed in London, at Heathrow Airport, I was especially grateful.  I would be taken from station to station and wait for my next ride there.  We had planned for plenty of time with a London layover of about 5 hours.  I finally reached my connecting flight gate with only one hour to spare.  When served by this service, you receive priviledges not commonly extended by the airlines.  Your attendant takes your passport and ticket, walks through blocked off line guards and around other people and even at security, puts everything you have in the tub and takes care of your every need.  As a handicapped person, you board first and get settled before everyone else is allowed to board.  I was even given bulkhead seating on one flight for my convenience and always the isle seat in every circumstance. 

Having traveled through Dallas/Fort Worth many times, and having a short layover there, my experience in the airport was uneventful.  I was a little bit anxious about what the airport at London might bring.  Brithish Airways met me at the end of the gangplank with a wheelchair.  My attendant took my information and took me to a waiting people mover.  I don't know why, but I was treated with much respect and given more attention than the other foreigners.  We were taken to a holding space where many people were waiting on transport.  Finally my name was called and I was taken to another people mover.  This time we drove on to a cargo elevator and were taken to the bowels of Heathrow airport.  It was very surreal.  We were in an underground tunnel that was concrete and lighted by these weird florescent purplish-blue lights.  We were virtually the only people down there, passing one or two other carts along the way.  It was something like being in a futuristic sy-fy movie.  I almost expected Twilight Zone music to start at any moment.  Our immediate destination was outside where we were transferred to a waiting bus.  At the bus stop, another wheelchair was awaiting me.  Finally, I was taken straight to my gate and left in the hands of the crew to continue the next leg of my flight and to my final destination.

In Bangalore, I was once again met by a wheelchair which took me through customs and straight to the luggage carriage.  A local was on hand to offer (for pay) to take my luggage outside where Chase would be waiting for me. 

It was an easy trip though very long and tiring.  I was so happy to see my tall American son-in-law standing right outside the door.  My long journey was over but the adventure had just begun.

I will post some of my experiences and thoughts (and pictures if I can figure that out) over the next few weeks as I am processing my time spent in a foreign land for several weeks. 

                                         Underground - Heathrow Airport, London, England