The Toilets of Xinjiang

Sounds gross, but you can't deny that you're curious. I thought I had seen a pretty wide variety of bathrooms while living in Beijing, but traveling in Xinjiang took my experience to a whole new level. My little notebook where I wrote down our notable memories of the trip contains something in basically every day's entry about some bathroom or another. The Chinese word is cesuo, which literally means "toilet." There are lots of other nicer words, equivalent to the English "restroom" and such, but I feel that cesuo is the most accurate for what we encountered. No American bathroom I've ever seen can measure up to the sketchiness of the Xinjiang cesuos. Our first day in Urumqi, we were at Carrefour, a French-owned, fairly upscale grocery chain, and I was advised that I didn't really even need to ask directions to the bathroom, I could just follow my nose. It was unfortunately true. It was such a disgusting cesuo that even Chinese people were holding their noses. Hen hao.

When we were driving our little van out in the desert coming back from the Pakistani border, our daoyou kept asking us if we wanted to "sing some songs." This confused me at the time, although I later learned that it's a Chinese euphemism for going to the bathroom. Useful knowledge. We stopped for a bathroom break, and the daoyou pointed at some walls, the ruins of a house, and said that the cesuo was there. We wandered around the walls, expecting to find some hole somewhere, but there really was none, in fact there was nothing more than a very loosely defined trench-ish area behind the walls. Good times. It was a character-building experience.

Our hotel bathrooms throughout the trip, while not as sketchy public bathrooms by any means (they were among the only bathrooms we encountered that featured toilet paper), all had the interesting feature of a lack of a distinct shower. Apparently it is common in Asia for the shower to just be a showerhead somewhere in the bathroom, so the whole bathroom is basically the shower. This wasn't totally bad, and it was convenient to be able to put shampoo bottles on the back of the toilet while showering, but it's still kind of weird. Our hotel bathroom in Urumqi also had translucent walls and a door with no lock. I could see the TV from the shower, although I couldn't tell what program was on, but it was still rather unnerving.

Other bathrooms of varying quality encountered on our trip:
Random buying-stuff place in Kashgar, where I think they sold carpets - one of the nicest public bathrooms I saw. We were really excited about it. It even had soap. We were all advising each other to go to the bathroom because we were so impressed. Take a look:


















So maybe standards are a little bit different in China, all right? Besides, a picture can't capture lack of disgusting bathroom smell.
Wind farm bathroom - I mean, who really needs pesky things like stall doors, or stall walls that are more than 2 feet high? So inconvenient to build, and it gets in the way of those nice bonding experiences you can have with the person in the stall next to you.
Place we stopped at on the way back to Urumqi from the vineyards - hole in the ground with no stalls, just planks set across the hole to put one's feet on and a wall around it. 2-person capacity. Looking down: not recommended. Another interesting feature: Chinese lady who thought it would be more fun to wait inside the bathroom and stare at that foreigner going to the bathroom than wait outside.
Shopping mall in Urumqi - stalls had walls and some even had doors, but it was all still over one big trench. The whole trench flushes automatically at random intervals, so the waste from the person in the stall next to you might be flushing past you as you go to the bathroom. Lovely.
Urumqi in general - All of Urumqi is a cesuo, we decided. This entire city smelled like a giant public toilet. The median strips on the roads looked and smelled so sketchy that we jumped across rather than step on them.
Train - Train bathrooms are notoriously sketchy, but our train bathrooms were actually cleaner than almost all of the other bathrooms on the trip.
Hotel in Dunhuang, the one where we ate lunch, not the one we stayed at - I feel that hotels should have higher standards than normal public bathrooms, but this place was incredibly rank, and had both a non-functioning lock on the door and no lights inside. Hen hao.
Mogao Caves - we figured that since it's a UNESCO site, the bathrooms might be held to some kind of standard, like the rest of the place. We figured wrong. I walked in, took one glance, and decided I didn't need to go that bad after all.
Restaurant in Jiayuguan - looked fabulously sketchy from the outside, although honestly it was pretty normal inside:














Lanzhou University dorm - one randomly-self-flushing trench for an entire floor of women. Un-bathroom-related: also there are 8 students to one room. Makes you appreciate your living situation, doesn't it?
Top of the mountain in Lanzhou - No lights, sketchy puddle in one corner. Yuck.
Airplane - Who cares if it's like 2 square feet in size? There's soap! And paper towels! This is the fanciest bathroom EVER.

Getting back to my Western-style bathroom with a normal toilet and a normal shower that I only share with my roommate was such a relief. (Although Western toilets elsewhere in China tend to actually be less clean to use than squatty potties, probably because Chinese people don't use them correctly so they get...sprayed a little. Ew) The moral of the story is that if you have access to a vaguely clean, non-smelly bathroom that has things like toilet paper and soap and hot water and towels and privacy, count yourself lucky. There's no question; American bathrooms are a luxury.