The Bathrooms are Different

In most public restrooms, there are two different types of toilet. First is the standard sit-down stool model that you’d find in the USA. The other kind is the “squatty potty”

Unfortunately in crowded public restrooms, people tend to… camp out… in the stalls with the sit-down toilets. You’ll have to use your imagination and figure out how to best align things when using the squat toilets, because nobody explained it to us either.

One interesting feature of pretty much every bathroom here (public or private) is the “bidet shower”

Some of them are fancy and have a sprayer on the end like this one, but sometimes it’s just a rubber hose attached to a small faucet.
Because of these things, public restroom floors are always wet. Oh, and the toilet paper is located OUTSIDE of the bathroom stalls (because it would just get wet if placed inside) – so if you didn’t remember to grab some before you go in, be prepared to guess how you’re supposed to use a bidet hose to clean off (bonus points for figuring out how to do that while using the squat toilet AND managing not to come out with soaked pants). That, or keep some spare toilet tissue in your wallet, just in case (no joke, that’s a common recommendation here).

And finally, our house does not have a hot water heater and tank. Instead, there are in-line heaters for all of the showers. That does mean there there is no hot water in any of the sinks, but tap water here never gets very far below lukewarm.

They work pretty well, and you never run out of hot water.

As a side note, all of the bathrooms in our house are fully tiled/sealed (including the walls) – so they can be cleaned by removing all of the “stuff” and spraying everything down. This is every bit as awesome as it sounds, and if we ever have to build or remodel a bathroom, this is going to be a major feature!