Sunday, June 8, 2014

My Arch nemesis: The wet bathroom

I have briefly written about it before, but due to my ongoing hatred I am going to dedicate an entire post to it. As you may or may not be aware, a wet bathroom is basically a regular bathroom that has the shower in the middle of the room without any separate enclosure.  So, everything into the bathroom gets wet and stays wet.

While initially this is a very strange concept for me, taking a shower under these conditions is surprisingly not that bad. We are fortunate here to have a western bathroom consisting of western toilet and regular shower (with the only difference being it has no shower enclosure).  Typical wet bathrooms have an Indian toilet and only a wall faucet with runs into a giant bucket in which Indians prefer to pour over their head using a small plastic cup.

A few of my biggest concerns with the wet bathroom include the fact that there is rarely any place suitable to keep your post shower clothing as everything gets wet and storage isn't really much of an option with the conditions of the bathroom itself.  Being accustomed to a large bathroom vanity and closet with tons of storage, is night and day different than the one small pedestal sink and 1 towel bar we have here.

The real fun starts after the shower. The bathroom has no fan and only 1 small window for ventilation so it gets pretty hot in there after the shower.  I generally try and kick everyone out of the attached bedroom so I can keep the bathroom door open and lock the bedroom door itself which allows for much better air circulation. This isn't always realistic, especially with multiple relatives staying with us (right now there are 4) which brings the total occupancy for this 2 bedroom/2 bathroom apartment to 12.  Without the luxury of having the whole bedroom and bathroom, I am confined to get dressed in the hot, humid, and soaking wet small space.  It reminds me of being a child and having to get dressed fast after swimming and how awkward and almost painful it is to put dry clothes on.

If you are lucky, only your pant bottoms get wet.  That is, if you have managed to find a place to balance the dry clothes on.  Frequently one item or another falls on the wet floor which not only ticks me off, but makes it 10 x harder to put on.

Oh, and the other really fun part of the bathroom setup here is that the Indian bathroom and western bathroom are connected by a rather large window, and although high up and meant to provide ventilation to the interior Indian bathroom, provides little in the form of privacy when both bathrooms are occupied.   I'm not sure this bothers anyone else, but I detest it.

So bottom line is me and the wet bathroom will never be friends.  We will be nice to each other for the sake of necessity, but other than that I will never have anything to do with it.  As with so many things in India, it is just barely tolerable, frustrating, and enough to drive a person crazy.



 

1 comment:

  1. I too had issues with the few wet bathrooms I had the misfortune of using in India. I stayed at a hotel here in the US once that had one when they gave me an ADA equipped room, here they're called curbless shower stalls. That wasn't much better because while they hung a curtain, it was literally hanging in the stream of water and thus useless. I think if the overall design was better and there was some form of storage and dry areas, these might be tolerable. But I too hated getting out of the shower and having only a wet floor to potentially slip and fall on and I found it just creepy that the toilet had virtually no separation from the shower. (As in there was no curb or barrier to create a wall.)

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