Toilet Talk

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Geo: 18.2458, 109.478

Despite the lousy weather forecast the sun is just about showing it's face through the clouds. Now we had a chance to explore our room and the rest of the hotel a little better and of course tested the toilet!

As advertised previously we have a fiendish Japanese style toilet. Gill has been too much of a coward to try it but in the cause of science and to help inform you dear reader I have risked life, limb and private parts. There is a control panel next to the toilet and when the buttons are pressed a little pipe moves out of the toilet seat and squirts your bum with warm water. It is not gentle, see the photographs. There are two different jets which can be stationary or wave about.

Once you have been washed you press another button and hot air is blown at your rear, it smelt a little of burning plastic, slightly alarming, I presume it is from the seat.

Will we be installing them in the Porch House? I think not, apart from the bad idea of having an electrical connection to the toilet seat what happens if the water gets too hot, or cold? The shock could kill someone and whilst I won't go into details it did not do as good a job as two sheets of loo paper.

So that's quite enough of toilet talk - although we are only 500 miles further south than Guilin, our last location, the climate is much warmer and more humid. It feels just like the Caribbean although the sand on the beach is much finer, it would be hopeless for cricket. At a guess the hotel has about 500 rooms, at breakfast there were twenty tables taken so I think we can safely say this is the low season. We took a walk along the beach yesterday morning to a marina, still in construction stages, a little distance away where there are about 50 shops all but two of which were temporarily closed or being refurbished. The two that were open sold jet-ski's and power boats, we were hoping to find somewhere which sold cans of beer and milk. We did find two restaurants, one Chinese the other Russian which confirms what we were told about the Russians from Siberian coming here although almost all the guests are Chinese.

One of the many preconceptions we had about China (most of which of course were wrong) is that there would be lots of foreign tourists i.e. Europeans and Americans, apart from the museum in Shanghai the vast majority (over 90%) of tourists have been Chinese. There seems a very wide income gap (probably disposable income gap as the basic cost of living is low) between the unskilled / semiskilled workers and the professional middle class. The middle classes are looking to spend their surplus money on their only child, cars, holidays and enjoying themselves and trips out are increasingly popular. To stay in the hotel we are in at the moment would cost someone on the average Chinese wage a months salary per night, most of the Chinese staying here are young professionals with their statuary one child who is spoilt rotten (not all but some make me cringe, the child who would not put her seatbelt on in the plane yesterday, she got away with it! A mother walking round behind her brat in the restaurant at breakfast, the child was allowed to play as much as she wanted, mum followed behind with food and occasionally the child condescended to take a bite!).

It is great that this new found wealth is being spent in China on Chinese made goods (all be it branded Nike or Volkswagen) and services, the real worry is the millions supposedly being transferred out of the country by the very rich elite.
It was also noticeable today a little bit of friction between the pool attendant who was male and about 25 and a group of male Chinese of the same age who were staying as guests. The attendant made a point of checking they were staying in the hotel and they in return were quite abrupt with the attendant.

We are now winding down and preparing ourselves for the journey home on Monday/Tuesday, by air, we have now had enough of trains. It is our wedding anniversary tomorrow so I don't suppose we will do very much at all so I suspect it will be Sunday before we do our last blog on our thoughts on China and suggestions for anyone thinking of coming here in the near future.

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Photos

Toilet squirters
On pressing the "rear wash" button the little tube moves into position and squirts a very powerful jet of warm water up your backside. How powerful - see the next picture.
The pack of soap is taped over the magic eye or bum detector to fool the toilet into working.

How Powerful?
A millisecond after this picture was taken I got a face full of water, I am about 6ft away and 6ft tall!