froginmythroat (FIMT)

I was in a little drink shop the other day and as my bowels haven’t yet adjusted to the new environment they find themselves in, I needed to leave my drink to make an urgent toilet stop. I asked the proprietor of the fine establishment where his even finer bathroom facilities might be. He pointed out back in a vague direction and said something in Indonesian which could have been ‘go through the shop, out the back door, around the building destroyed by the earthquake, through the wooden gate to the well, turn right and it’s the concrete trough angled into a small hole in the floor inside the wooden shack’, because that’s where it was, but not knowing Indonesian I had no idea what he said.

I did find it though, and find it I did, complete with the remnants of the previous occupant. So I went back and grabbed the full pail of water next to the well, to wash the trough clean. After doing so I returned to the well to fill up the pail again and at this point a gentleman entered stage left. He kindly assisted me with getting water up from the well and then proceeded to ask me for money. He wanted 5000IDR (a little less than $1NZD) for the use of the toilet.

I tried to tell him that I hadn’t actually used the toilet yet and with hand gestures suggested he check the state of the toilet for himself. He did, and seemed satisfied until he then noticed my fly was undone and started to mime quite graphically how one might urinate all over the place. I didn’t really know how to get out of that one, and so looked up in my dictionary how to say “I have no money�. Trying to make people believe you have no money if you are a white guy in Asia is pretty hard and the Toilet Keeper wasn’t really buying it. I said I would come back tomorrow and pay him 1000IDR. He seemed to agree and then got out a pen and paper and wrote something that he wanted me to sign. Using my dictionary I deciphered it as saying “I will come back tomorrow to pay 100,000IDR ($15NZD)�. Wooo, that’s a lot of interest for one day, maybe you should give up policing toilets and become a money lender? As promising an offer as it was, I just couldn’t agree to it and again told him that I would pay 1000IDR. It was at this point that luckily, before any more zeros got added to the price, the owner of the shop appeared and must have said something to make him happy so that I could be excused and return to the shop to finish my drink. In the end I never did get to relieve myself but strangely didn’t need to after my encounter with the Keeper of the Toilet.