The Toilet With A View

Phew! This turned out to be a much busier week than I anticipated. A good week, but busy.

I recently was having dinner in a nicer Western-style restaurant in a local mall. I walked into the Western-style toilet stall at the back of the bathroom and saw this:

I hesitated for a moment, then convinced myself the windows were treated on the outside with a reflective covering and no one could really see me. But honestly? I would have used it anyway. My privacy paradigm has certainly shifted over the last almost-two years of living in China. So if you want to see my bare bum, all you have to do is move to Chongqing.

I do think it’s funny someone saw this space and decided it was a good spot for a toilet.

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As promised, a few more videos.

This one shows me eating hot pot, the traditional Chongqing meal, at an automated rotating table. Each person at the table has their own little pot of spicy, spicy broth, into which you drop whatever you want to eat; when it’s cooked, you fish the food back out with your chopsticks. The table rotates throughout the whole meal, and you just grab what you want as it goes by. I kinda love hot pot. And auto-rotating tables.

I took this video at a dance/singing competition my students hosted; they asked me and Andrew to be judges. It was one of those surreal intercultural moments I often experience here; students in Chongqing, China, dancing to Rumpshaker in a totally non-ironic way. Where did they even hear this song?? I have no idea.

Not a video, but a picture of how floors are numbered in China; it’s a bit different than in North America. The ground floor is numbered, and what would be our 2nd floor is called the 1st floor. So in this mall near my house, there’s a lower level, ground floor, THEN 1st floor. This messes me up all the time when I’m asking for directions, because some buildings are migrating to the American style of counting, but others still use the Chinese style. So I end up just wandering around until I get to the right floor.