A while back I declared that my least favorite thing about China was the squat toilet. When you're out traveling in rural China, though, there are a lot of things about which you don't have a lot of choice, and not only did I get plenty used to the squat toilet, I can also say that I've dropped trou over a shared trough that was only sheltered on three sides, 4000m up a mountain (gentlemen will please remember that this is not common custom for Western distaff). That wasn't the only trough, either.

When I saw this outdoor "restroom" (trust me, no one wanted to rest here, and it looked like no one had in weeks) behind a rarely-visited museum in Hue, I rather hoped someone could point me to a trough. The level of maintenance of this sink should give you a good idea of what the rest of the place looked like. I didn't take a photo of the stall, which did feature a Western-style toilet, because I really didn't want to see any more of it than I had to. Suffice it to say that I was glad I was carrying plenty of tissue paper, and that the other occupants of the stall (several spiders, including one that was the size of my two pinky fingers side-by-side; what may have been a baby scorpion; and a few flying things) were not quick enough to investigate the newcomer to actually reach me before I exited.