Thursday, June 5, 2008

Derrick's Story

Warning from Miranda: Dear friends and family, if you know Derrick, you know that he does not mind talking about certain things that others might find inappropriate. This story is such an occasion...he was brave enough to ask a teacher he works with a certain question that was burning on his mind since the day he arrived in that school. If you have traveled to certain countries and have experienced the uncomfortable non-western toilet, you will understand why this question can be of great importance. Please consider this a warning that if you continue reading this story, you will be reading about toilets...however, if you so choose to continue reading this story, you are in for a hilarious treat!
This story will be posted in 3 or 4 different chapters....to keep up the suspence.

Chapter One: The Beginning

It was a regular Monday morning, except I had to go poop… the hard thing was that in my school all of the toilets that I have ever seen have been these squatter toilets. What I mean by squatter toilets is that it is a toilet that is basically just a depression in the floor that you have to stand over and do a squat to poop in them, and it’s super hard!!! Anyway, I like to relax while I poop, and so nothing is better than having a nice clean western toilet to poop in (some of the western toilets here have heated toilet seats). So I’m sitting in the teachers room with nothing to do besides think about the pressure that is building up inside of me, when I decide that it’s about time that I ask one of the male teachers if there is a western toilet in the school that I could use. So I went up to him and said “sumi masen” (excuse me/help please), he looked up and I asked “is there a western toilet?” He thought for a second and then replied with “maybe one in school.” So I thought that this was a good sign, and hoped that maybe he knew of a hidden restroom that I had not yet strip-searched. So he gave me the sign to follow him and I followed him in and out of one restroom up one set of stairs, into another bathroom and then up another set of stairs to explore the two bathrooms on the third floor. He basically gave me a guided tour of all the restrooms that I had already searched when I had decided to look for a western toilet the week before. After the fourth bathroom I finally told him that I had already looked in all of the restrooms in the main part of the school and that there simply was not a western toilet. After about five minutes of explaining, he finally understood and we went back down the flights of stairs to the teachers room; he apologized to me, and for the moment it seemed that he had given up and that we could not find one and would not find one.

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