[Kara] Bidet, Mate!

We have been traveling for over three months now.  We have stayed in a lot of hotel rooms, ranging from super cushy to bare bones.  The hotel room feature I didn't expect to find all around the world and in all price brackets is the bidet.  I think we've had bidets in 75% of the hotels we've stayed in.  But for much of the beginning of our trip, I didn't realize that we had bidets because they didn't look like traditional bidets.

This is what I think of as a bidet.  How does one use this thing?  I mean . . . really.  It has no seat--just the equivalent of a toilet rim, so you can't sit on it.  At least I can't.  (According to the good folks at bidet.org, you might prefer to sit on it facing the wall.  However, that necessitates removing your pants and makes it even less likely that I'd use this thing.)  The nozzle points down when the part you want washed is up (especially when you can't sit on it).  Nothing about this contraption makes me feel happy or clean.  We've had a couple of traditional bidets in our hotel rooms, but not many.  None of us have used them.

What we have seen a lot of are these hand-held sprayers.  For months, as we traveled across Asia, I had no idea what they were for.  I speculated that perhaps they were hand-held mini showers next to the bathroom sink.  You know, like the spray nozzle at your kitchen sink.  (Though why someone would want a sprayer at their bathroom sink that would spray water all over the bathroom, was perplexing.) But then I realized that the only times these were located next to the sink was when the sink was next to the toilet.  So maybe this sprayer was for for hosing down the toilet and/or bathroom to clean it?  

Eventually I Googled it.  It's called a "bidet shower" or, more euphemistically, a "health faucet."  You pick it up, point it where you need to be cleaned (with the inside of the toilet bowl as your backstop) and pull the trigger.  The bidet shower is connected to the toilet plumbing, so it doesn't require much space or significant alterations to your bathroom, should you wish to install one at home.  The only drawback of this setup compared to the traditional bidet is that you can't control the water temperature, so you might be in for a cold shock.

The final bidet option we've encountered is the bidet/toilet combination.  I thought these only existed in wacky Japanese toilets, but here is a picture of a non-Japanese toilet with a bidet feature built into it.  If you pull out the white knob on the side of the toilet, a stream of water sprays out of the nozzle in the back of the toilet bowl--it's aim is directed so that if there's no body part sitting on the toilet, the water will go quite a ways.  We know this because Grace, in an attempt to flush the toilet, pulled that white knob.  Mercifully, she was standing out of the line of fire because the water sprayed for several feet and hit the wall opposite the toilet with significant force.  (Yes, she knows how to flush the toilet.  It just so happened that the flush mechanism on this toilet was broken and so she didn't know if she was using the right knob . . . and got quite a shock when the water shot past her.)

We hit the motherlode of all bidet features in our hotel room in Cairo which had ALL THREE types of bidets in a single bathroom.  (All of these pictures came from that bathroom.)  I can't figure out why they had all the bidet bases covered.  But after so many nights in hotel rooms I've learned that there's not necessarily any rhyme or reason to hotel fixtures.  (But that's the subject of a future blog post.)