Flying Toilets

Interesting toilets fascinate me. So much so that when I travel, I take my camera along to the bathroom just in case there's a noteworthy commode to document. Stand-out toilets have ranged from posh to plain, prodigious to pee-wee, and from pristine to downright health hazards.

An example on the posh side is the ladies room at the Columbia Tower Club ("Seattle's premier private business and fine dining club") located at the top of the Bank of America Tower, Seattle's tallest building. The women's restroom is actually a set of toilet suites, each with it's own door leading to a private toilet, sink, and floor-to-ceiling windows offering sweeping views of Mt. Rainier and the Puget Sound. Seriously, these are the best seats in the house—think Queen sitting on her throne, and you've got the picture.

On the flip side, after driving a couple hours through the tundra from Nome, Alaska to the small town of Teller (pop. 278), I felt the urge...urgently. There was only one store in town that doubled as the post office, and I probably could have found the sheriff there too if I had asked, but I was on a mission. The store keeper simply pointed to the back room. There I found a bucket. Only a bucket.

I trace my interest in toilets to my grandparent's farm in rural Idaho. My Grandma was very nostalgic and liked things the way they used to be in the "good old days." Every so often when nature called, she would make me leave modern plumbing behind and and march me out the front door, through the squeaky gate, down the railroad-tie steps, and past the chicken coupe to the privy. That's an old-fashioned name for an outhouse. It was old, dark, and filled with cobwebs, but it was the same one she used as a girl and by golly, if it was good enough for her, well, then...you get the picture.

A decade later, I found myself living in Germany as an exchange student in an adorable little house with the nicest family and the oddest toilet I'd ever seen in my not-well-traveled life. There was a raised platform where the water should have been and anything that landed on it stayed there until you flushed. The trouble was, I couldn't figure out how to do that. Every toilet I'd ever seen had a handle.

Now that I'm older and wiser, I know that to flush toilets I must look for levers, pull-chains, buttons, motion sensor pads, knobs, remote controls, and even must lock the bathroom door.


Bathroom facilities are as varied as the people who use them...and those who design them. I always wonder who decided on this style of toilet? How did they choose the floor tile? Why did they decide to spring for both linens and paper towels, but not a blow dryer? What influenced their choice of wall colors? And for Pete's sake, who chose this terrible artwork!?


Some of my more thought provoking lavatory experiences...

* A restroom that is actually carved out of the stone in the side of a mountain, high up in the Alps. (I have no idea how they ran the plumbing up there.)
* Japanese toilets with full accessory packages including a full bum wash, you pick your water temperature and pressure. (Warm is very nice.)
* Urinals in a Frankfurt men's room shaped like a big set of Rolling Stones lips. (Now, that's Satisfaction!)
* And, then there's always a tree.


While some bathrooms took a designer hundreds of hours to detail, and others are just utility rooms inserted to meet building codes, there is yet another toilet in a category of its own--the flying toilet. With my lifelong interest in the subject, my ears perked up when I heard a story this week on public radio about the flying toilets in Nairobi, Kenya. At first blush, the name conjures images of cartoon toilets with wings, but the reality is far more grim. Wikipedia says, "A flying toilet is a facetious name for the use of plastic bags for defecation, which are then thrown into ditches, on the roadside, or simply as far away as possible."

Far away isn't far enough. The story went on to explain that the streets and rooftops in the Nairobi slums are covered in these bags of waste. People get hit with them as they are blindly tossed, and children run and play barefoot in the filth. It's sad and shocking, and a good reminder to me to appreciate how good I have it, even if it's sometimes just a bucket.


(To hear the NPR story on Flying Toilets, visit http://www.worldvisionreport.org/Stories/Week-of-May-29-2010/Flying-Toilets)