English What Now? is an ongoing series based around the humorous, head-scratching, or just plain amusing English found around Thailand observed and written by Teresa Derr.
Teresa Derr, 134 YinD
This past year, Thailand had a Happy Bathroom initiative, to promote clean bathrooms and better hygiene. All of my schools participated, cleaning up their bathrooms, restocking soaps, decorating… and also posting more signs. Hopefully, my toilet humor wasn’t too stinky last time and you can stand round two of this particular topic!
Weirdly, this picture has the opposite instructions of most toilets in Thailand, saying DO throw your toilet paper into the toilet, and DON’T throw your toilet paper into the trash can. But it does correctly tell you how to sit on a toilet in Thailand. No one wants to be a broken, injured elephant sitting in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor! At least, it certainly makes me want to be cautious of how I sit on the toilet.
I promise, this was posted in both the girls and boys bathrooms – I wasn’t accidentally using the wrong side of the toilet! But I honestly think most of the people who use this bathroom are old enough to know not to ‘spread urine’ everywhere. It was news to me that squatting on a western toilet will give you constipation and make you sweat buckets – I thought that was just a natural consequence of eating something weird and then being stuck in a room with no airflow when it’s hot outside. Either way, I won’t be squatting on a toilet!
I know this is likely some variation on where to dispose of trash and toilet paper while in this restroom, but with the way some of the words are washed out, I could only read “Please do not throw tissue paper and the toilet.” It made me laugh to think of someone picking up and throwing a whole toilet. I’m sure it’s happened before!
In case you can’t read the (again, very washed out) words, it says “Please be careful. Do not pressure wash basin. If it break. You need to pay for buy a new one.” I made sure to be very kind to the sink, always checking that it was okay to wash my hands before I used it and making sure it felt like I wasn’t pressuring it to do anything. I don’t even know how much therapy might be needed if the wash basin had a mental breakdown!
I’m not sure how one goes about pedaling the sink, so I guess I’ll just make sure to never jump in the air and kick the sink, as I think the picture shows. Hopefully, that should cover all banned pedaling actions.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you’re still laughing at this, send along any other weird and confusing bathroom signs! Maybe there will be a part three.
Sticky Rice 
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