adrian is rad

(Here’s another post from my Taiwan backlog.)

I found the bathrooms in Taiwan pretty interesting. I sort of wanted to take photos of them except that it would make me a bit creepy[1], so I didn’t.

In America, many, if not most, urinals are of the short and blocky variety, like this American Standard one, but in Taiwan and other parts of Asia, they were of all sorts, short, tall, down to the floor, curved, blocky, narrow, deep and so on. Many of them were made by Toto (“I bless the raaaaiins down in Aaaaaaaafrica!” is what I’d sing in my head each time I saw one of those.)

There were also numerous funny signs. Two of my favorite are below.

In the MRT stations in Taipei:

Come Closer Please
automatic flushing when you draw near

This one I’d always imagine the “come closer please” said low and breathy, like a movie monster or serial killer. Because, I mean, when else do you hear “come closer please”?

In the train station in Hualien:

Stand Closer
to be discrete and clean

There was also a theme in many bathrooms of things that said something like “Let’s learn English!” with an English idiom and its Chinese meaning. Some of these idioms were not very common or possibly not idioms at all. I’d love it for a Chinese person to come to America and then say one of those and when people looked at him questioning, he would have to explain that he learned it in a bathroom so it must be right!

There were also a lot of proverbs and old sayings on walls. These were also translated into English. Most of them were not very funny.

I did take one photo of a sign in a bathroom in Thailand:

I hadn’t really considered washing my feet in the sink but now that they mention it, it does sound like a good idea!

Outside of a bathroom, but still related:

[1] Is this post creepy anyway?