Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts

Friday, June 15, 2007

Paradise Lost Down the Toilet

WARNING - The following tale is downright gross and disgusting. And it's also absolutely true. You can blame La Cubana Gringa for reminding me of this terrible story and I'm posting it as a sort of response to her Curious Incident of the Poo in the Daytime.

I promise you the scat stories will stop very, very soon. I've just about had enough.


Back in early 2005 I was in Thailand attending my friends’ wedding. The venue for the nuptials was the Evason Resort located in Hua Hin, a few hours down the coast from Bangkok.

The resort was one of those swanky five star joints where everyone is waited on hand-and-foot. Lemongrass makes its way into everything the hotel does, from the scent in the hand towels in the restrooms to the fragrance of the soap—lemongrass everywhere. You can’t escape it.

After a night of putting away strange tropical drinks a few friends and I were nursing hangovers and lazily chewing on pastries from the opulent buffet breakfast at the beach-side restaurant. I’d just poured the first cup of coffee of the day down my guts. I call it the juice loosener for obvious reasons.

“Where’s a good place to take a luxurious dump around here?” I asked my friends.

They all had an opinion and the best recommendation was a relatively isolated restroom just off the path as you make your way from the hotel rooms to the restaurant we were currently stationed. My friends, all true connoisseurs of bowel evacuation, assured me the afore-mentioned restroom offered the best possible shitting experience. They would tell me no more and suggested I experience it first hand.

With the gradually angering turd starting to bash flat-top on my undies—three cups of coffee in rapid succession brings it on quickly—I waddled my way to the highly touted crapper.

My mates weren’t wrong. Walking into the restrooms I was presented with a worthy sight: neatly rolled towels in a basket; perfectly arranged moisturizers arrayed alongside a brightly polished sink accompanied by fragrant white lilies floating in a stainless steel bowl of clear water. Two cylindrical, brushed steel urinals stood proudly on a smooth concrete floor. Tracing a path around the perimeter of the room was what looked like a small crystal clear moat dotted with more floating white lilies. The moat ran in a rectangle around the edge of the room with the two urinals on the short end of the rectangle facing the water's edge and the two stalls situated on both of the rectangle's long sides. Sliding the stall door open I went inside and dropped my strides. Peace at last.

As I commenced my bodily evacuation process I surveyed the placid scene. A perfectly clean, lemongrass-scented toiled seat cradled my cheeks while lily-dotted water trickled lightly in harmony with my piss. It was as if the moat and my body were singing a harmony. Ah, what more could I want?

My moment of tranquil solitude was suddenly smashed by the sound of a boisterous intruder. With motions that implied urgency the intruder rattled on the door of the adjacent stall. Evidently someone else was already in there, enjoying a dump just as peaceful as mine. No luck there. Then came the rattle on my stall's door; his body casting an amorphous shadow over my cubicle's semi-opaque white screen.

“Ooh, fookin’ hell! Fookin’ hell!” he muttered with a tone of frustration, rattling the door once again. Oh great, I thought, he sounds like he's English.

Again he reached for my neighbour’s door, gave it a raucous shake and cried with a hint of pain in his voice “Fook! Fook! Fook!” Yep, he's definitely English and probably much older than me.

Paying him no mind I went back to wiping, making sure to smear as much of that lemony paper all over my behind. It smelled so nice.

Then all went quiet—eerily quiet. Good, I though, I can complete this crap without any further hassles. So after hitching my shorts back up I emerged to give my hands a good lemongrass dousing at the basin.

The scene then presented to me didn't entirely make sense.

A graying, once ginger-haired man was hovering over the urinal. His pants were down around his ankles and his hand was reaching down towards his nether regions. Ah fuck, I thought, it’s some old coot fiddling with himself. Quick! Wash your hands and get the hell out of here. I didn’t care to witness some old codger debauch himself any further. It was disgusting.

Scrubbing my hands down as fast as I could I made my exit, making sure to make absolutely no eye contact with the wanky old man milking his member in my place of peace. It’s fucking gross, but I was out. Free.

As I wandered back to the buffet, I spied the man leaving the restroom only a few seconds after me. Maybe I scared him or broke his concentration, I’m not sure which, but what I then saw made it all clear to me. As the desperate wanker walked off in a divergent direction it became apparent to me what had been going on: a long, distinct streak of his bodily effluent was smeared down the back of his pants. The crotchety coot had crapped himself. He wasn’t jerking his gherkin over the urinal, he was taking a dump. Too many Thai curries had got the better of his GI tract. His panicked sphincter couldn’t contain his curried-up bowels any longer and in a final act of desperation he’d dispersed his poop all over the pristine, lemony urinal.

Thoughts immediately sprang to mind. Should I tell him he’s got shit running down the back of pants? Shall I let him know that when he goes back to the lounge and sits down with his high-class buddies that he’s going to be stamping the velvet with his butt chocolate? Nah, why spoil the fun. More to the point I was too embarrassed for him. I couldn't bring myself to walk up to the man, tap on his shoulder and say, "Hey mate, you've got a dirty big streak of crap on the back of your shorts." It just wouldn't have been right.

Making my way back to the breakfast table I told the tale to my friends. They were enthralled and wanted to witness the scene of the crime. I obliged their interest and showed them the way. Sure enough, there in the urinal was some old codger’s crap. And just to prove how lazy he was, lying there in the middle of the concrete floor was his calling card: an orange-brown nugget of old man feces. I nearly collapsed due to my laughter. A couple of friends shrieked in a combination of disgust and delight.

About thirty minutes later I walked on past the restroom, casting an eye to see what had been done. It was cordoned off and inside a poor hotel worker was tackling the shittiest job going that day: scrubbing up after the loose-arsed limey. I couldn’t have felt more pity.

Friday, June 08, 2007

Come Fly with Me

Let's talk on cellphones really loudly. Let's power dress. Let's attach our wireless electronics to our belts. Let's advertise to the world how important we are by attaching more than one. Let's strut down the concourse with obvious purpose. Let's pretend to think it's not obvious. Let's hope other people are noticing. Let's position our luggage next to a seat so as to preserve our personal space. Let's make sure we're the first in line. Let's cut in if we're not. Let's ignore the half-mumbled complaints of those around us as we edge our way in. Let's make a point of fidgeting as the jetway gets backed up. Let's block the aisle with our belly bulging from too many expensed meals while we shove, shove, shove our oversized luggage into the overhead bins. Let's argue with the flight attendant who points out that it won't fit. Let's finally be seated. Let's tilt the recliner back as far as it will go. Let's imagine that there's no seat behind us. Let's fall asleep and snore loudly. Let's have a nice flight.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

It's Coloradical

I'm on a business trip to Longmont, Colorado. The mountains are spectacular, the people agreeable and kind and I really don't care for it all that much. There's something about this particular part of the country that sets me off and it leaps into dreary, banal life the minute the car approaches the center town on the 119 approach.

Longmont is relatively new, spurred into growth from the embryo of an old rural town by the encroachment of a satellite tech industry. Searching for a cheaper place to drop a pile of engineers, a handful Silicon Valley tech companies demonstrated prudent financial wisdom by opening offices in the sprawling plains seated at the feet of the Rockies. Mimicking the outer reaches of greater Sacramento, the cookie-cutter homes plopped out on the bleak expanse by the over-enthusiastic rectum of the house shitting machine nestle up as close as humanly possible to a crop of newly sprouted strip malls replete with an Applebee's, a Staple's and a Best Buy. Just add a multiplex movie theater chain it's called a community, or maybe even a city. Just don't nestle up too close, of course, lest that precious buffer zone around the house that keeps the family "safe" be sacrificed. There are dangerous people out there who want what's inside and they'll do evil things to get in. Evil.

I keep the trips short, zipping in the night before and vacating without so much as a cloud of dust behind me the next evening. It's a sullen view of a part of the country that must have some charm buried somewhere, but so long as Longmont remains determined to reinvent itself as a bland facsimile of Anaheim I'll elect to keep my distance and visit only when I'm ordered.