In my sophomore year of college, I took a class on anthropology, the main focus of which is culture. It gave me a lot of insight into the different ways people live. We studied religious cannibalism, arranged marriages, and gender roles. However, my experience with traveling has made me realize that adjusting to the smaller cultural differences can be harder than the extreme ones. My time abroad challenged a lot of my habits: dorms had outdoor bathrooms, so I had to get changed in the shower; tests were all taken in pen; the cars drove on the right side of the road. My favorite example, however, when I tell people about the differences in life, is the bathrooms.

Despite its constancy in our (hopefully) daily routine, most of us barely stop to consider the toilet. It is perhaps the most mundane of semi-essential objects. Even during visitations, most of us are distracted by the task on hand or utilize the time to interact with their cellular devices. It is possible to spend an inexorable amount of time playing an interactive game, without giving the plastic bowl they sit on a single thought. In this post, however, I will gift the toilet with a little more grandeur than simply as a medium which prevents us from throwing our shit in the street and explain how it can be used to explore cultural difference.

First, let us consider the American toilet. When you are going to visit the toilet in America you state that you are, “going to the bathroom”. This is because, in residential American homes, the toilet resides in the same room as the shower or bathtub (the facilities you use to bathe sense bathroom). In contrast, I have been told baths in Japan cannot be located with the toilets. This obviously indicates a cultural difference between America and Japan, however I lived in Singapore, so I’m not going to talk much more about Japan.

In addition, American bathrooms usually come equipped with toilet paper and a place to wash you hands, in the form of a sink, soap, and (a) towel(s). A public toilet exists in a different environment. It is placed in a stall, near a few other fellow toilets, allowing multiple people to utilize the “bathroom” in privacy (for some reason this is still called a bathroom but there is no bath). It has a metal lock on the door. If you are lucky, there will only be a small gap between this door and the stall wall, and if you are even luckier the toilet will be clean. The sink in these restrooms are communal, with dispensers for soap and paper towels to dry hands. Both private and public bathrooms in America have a mirror hanging over the sink, and can also be called “powder rooms” because women use them to apply make up. Near the toilet of a woman’s restroom, a small trashcan used to dispose of pads and tampons. In the male bathrooms, there are usually urinals unguarded by stalls.

When I first encountered the bathrooms in Singapore, they solidified the fact that I had entered another country. I thought they were amazing. Unlike American bathrooms, where one can peer under the door to check for occupancy, the doors and sides of the stalls go all the way to the bottom. A friend told me this is to protect occupants from “peeping” or other looking people at them while they are doing there thang. Instead of looking under a door to determine where the stall is vacant, they have displays on the outside which is colored green or red, much like American outhouses. While some of the newer toilets do not have this feature, many in older buildings have shelf behind the toilet, which gives occupants an alternative to putting their purses or other items on the floor. Public restrooms are much cleaner than ones in American, and many public restrooms have signs on the door which present cartoons on how dirty restrooms negatively effect the public.

Many of these traits represent how other aspects of society in Singapore are conducted. Singapore tries to provide for the safety of its people, and greatly values public spaces (like the MRT, the buses, the parks, and other services). This is seen in how residence take care of their facilities. Because it is such a large city, and people move quickly, it is efficient to design locks which attest to the occupancy of a restroom.

Other values of the community can been seen in the restrooms. Singapore is a very environmentally friendly city, as the lack of paper towels attests to The locks on these toilets are usually plastic, not metal, and the soap dispensers are less frequent than in America (about one per five sinks, rather than one per two sinks). While I have been here, I have not seen a single paper towel dispenser, and the faucets will only spray water when being held down, which conserves water usage. Unfortunately many of the bathrooms are located on campus or in public places lack air conditioning. It is also a community driven city, and there are signs which urge users to look after the stalls so the cleaning people don't have to

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In a bathroom, at least one stall has a style of toilet most Americans aren’t familiar with. It is shaped like the opening to a standard toilet, however it it set into a lofted section floor about four inches off the rest of the floor. Other conventional toilets have tubes which can be used to spray water from them. This is a testimony to the multiculturalism I have explored earlier. Because the multiculturalism is an aspect of pride for Singapore, bathrooms are designed to accommodate people who squat instead of sit which going to the bathroom. Other countries have toilets designed like this, because it is the more natural way of sitting. The water can be used to clean yourself, as is done in other cultures, instead of using paper. This may be another reason there are fewer soap dispensers in the bathrooms here.

While I took an instant liking to the restrooms here, a fellow American student feels it decreases the comfort of the bathrooms. Because the doors and walls reach all the way to the ground, it doesn’t allow the air to circulate well, which makes her “hot and uncomfortable”. Other western students have disliked how few soap dispensers there are, and don’t like having to dry their hands without towels.

Before I traveled, I was never aware of the objects which created continuity in my life. Regardless of how mundane an object seems, it can be a point of cultural difference, and can illuminate certain aspects of different cultures. Removing those familiarities upends each small motion of the day, and can extrapolate wonder or exacerbate the desire to return home.