Here’s a picture of my bathroom:

When I was young, as soon as my family sat down for a meal at a restaurant I’d hop up to go find the bathroom. I don’t know why, but it interested me for some reason. So—I decided to explore my bathroom for you, if only because it’s a bit different from what you’re probably familiar with—and different is interesting.

The typical “Filipino” bathroom is a combination of a shower and toilet in one tiled room, usually without a curtain or shower guard in between. The shower water drains down a hole (usually with a strainer over it) in the middle of the bathroom. The result is a floor that’s quite wet when you have to use the toilet any other time of day. The toilets are often very low (for me anyway) since most Filipinos are about a head shorter than I am—especially in rural areas. I always feel like the jolly white giant when I’m here.

Close up of toilet:The toilets use a manual flush system—there’s often a bucket in the bathroom with a scooper that stays under a spigot and gets filled up often during the day. When you’re done with your business, you flush the toilet by scooping water and dumping it down the toilet. There are an increasing amount of flush toilets in Manila, especially in the more westernized area, but this system is still the most common. I’ve been in public bathrooms with a 50 gallon barrel full of water and a hose in it, with a scooper floating on top. When I finished, I step out of the stall (carefully—the floor is usually wet), grab the scooper, then dump it down the toilet.

Toilet paper’s not commonly provided, though I think many women bring their own tissue. I forget this sometimes and as a result, I’ve torn a few pages from newspapers or notebooks. What most Filipinos do is wash themselves with the water from the scooper. I think that method, plus the wet floors, is just a little too much moisture for me in one sitting.

There is rarely soap in a bathroom—esp. if you are in an outlying area. Manila often offers soap in its mall restrooms or other upscale/ westernized establishments and restaurants.

Close up of shower:

Lastly, the shower. The common Filipino shower (though I think this is changing) is a bucket with a scooper. You fill up the bucket with cold water and scoop it over your head, soaping up in between scoops. Though it sounds awfully cold at the moment—it’s actually not bad when you’re in sultry Manila in the middle of May. But up here it’s a little brisk—this time of year the temperature hovers around 40 or 50 degrees F, in fact it’s rained every day since I arrived.

To accommodate travelers, most hotel owners purchase shower heads with “hot water heaters” that only run when the shower water does, and also provides somewhat of the typical shower experience that most foreigners are used to. I put hot water heaters in quotes because really, I have yet to have warm water come out of mine. At this point, the water is more “not-freezing” than it is warm. But I’ll take that over freezing any day. Occasionally, there’s a bout of lukewarm that gets me really excited and hopeful, though usually it quickly passes down the drain.