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Other kinds of bathroom design
In many places, bathrooms are not like the
ones that people living in the industrialized cities of modern Europe,
Canada, and the USA are used to using. For instance, in rural India, many
people live in houses that have no bathrooms. The houses themselves are
made from straw and mud and have dirt floors. Sometimes the floors are
compacted with clay and other materials to make them so hard and
impervious that they actually look polished after they are swept with
special brooms fashioned from the leaves and stalks of plants or trees.
But the bathroom will usually consist of a field in the distance, away
from water supplies, that serves as a latrine and is plowed under, perhaps
with lime, from time to time to get rid of the sewage, and for bating
people with use the river or a bucket poured over their heads.
But they often wear home spun cloth of thin cotton, and even though they
will sometimes wear the cloth while bathing, or will almost always use a
piece of it for a towel, it dries very easily in the hot sun of India,
where people will just lay it across a bush or on the grass and spread it
out, for it to dry in about an hour or less.
In Applachia, the mountainous area that runs north and south in the
eastern part of the USA, bathroom design is a tradition, and people still
use outhouses, which are little buildings that resemble portable toilets
like those used on construction sites or at outdoor festival sites, and
these traditional outhouses are made of simple planks of wood. One of the
most interesting was created by an artist who lived in that area, near the
town of Boone, NC. He made his outhouse from an old British telephone
booth that he found in an antique store, so that he could do his personal
business while watching the sun set in the distance through the glass
panes of his imported antique phone booth bathroom.
There are actually some wonderfully interesting coffee table books that
show photographs of various types of bathrooms and bathroom design all
over the world, in places ranging from Siberia to Viet Nam to France. You
might consider getting one of these books to add to the little library
next to your toilet, next time you decide to redecorate your bathroom.
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