Let's Talk About Plumbing

OK, there are good things about living here and there are some challenges, plumbing is one of the challenges! One of the first things you will notice about an asian country is that it smells "different" than America. Wow, I'm having trouble even knowing where to begin on this subject so let's start from the beginning...

Long ago, all the bathrooms in Asia pretty much looked like this...

http://www.wikihow.com/Image:China_Toilet-1_611.jpg

Yes, the link says China, but it's like this all over Asia (except this is a REALLY clean one! Picture it about 100 times filthier than this one!)

Now, I don't know about you but these bathroom confuse and frighten me. I don't even know what to do when I am faced with this and I have tennies and jeans on! Needless to say, when you know you are going to be in an old government building for the day or you may be in the middle of nowhere for awhile, you may have to face this situation!

Even now, when I know I will have a regular style toilet, you may not get toilet paper! So I always carry kleenex or tp in my bag with me! Don't worry, we have nice, new, regular style toilets in our house. Oh yeah, another thing, there is always the sprayer hose next to the toilet, even the regular toilets, um, I don't get it...yuck! I guess it's a Asia/European thing because they have them all over Europe too! We have 4 bathroom in our home and they all have these sprayers, we don't use them...

So anyway, back to the point, the quality of ANYTHING in Thailand is poor, we are having to learn patience in EVERY area. Mint, our personal assistant, along with anyone else we try to get sympathy from, says "you will just have to get rid of your expectations, or you will always be unhappy". They are right. But we pride ourselves in being really efficient, productive people! We can get so much done! We are going to change Thailand! Yeah, right...I think Thailand will change us...Everyone keeps telling us we need to relax, don't move so fast! Are you kidding me! This is a whole new world! :)

So, the quality of everything is poor, and plumbing is no exception. The smell in the bathrooms a couple of times a day, for some reason we cannot figure out, is really bad. We thought it was because the pipes are in an L shape with no trap to capture water that blocks the smelly stuff from coming out so we changed all the pipes to the kind with the trap. Nope, that wasn't it. The plumber has been out 5 times now to fix leaks and now our shower drain is clogged on the 4th floor and we noticed that the toilets are not bolted to the floor and you can actually move them around! We asked the plumber to fix them and he just caulked around them. We said they probably need to be bolted and then caulked. He says, if this doesn't work then he will think about bolting them down! Yikes!

I have to go help with dinner. I will blog more tomorrow!