There are many advantages to living in South East Asia or SEA as it is commonly known and many of them relate to finance, the overall cost of living, and the fact that for most of the area, it is never winter here. However, I want to focus on something that all of us have in our lives and spend some amount of time in each day (hopefully) and that is the bathroom (toilet.)
These are in no particular order but all are important.
Water is basically free
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When I hear the stories of massive water bills that my friends suffer back in the USA I can only shake my head in disbelief. Stories of bills in excess of a hundred dollars is just insane to me. It's water... why does it cost so much.
The bill above is not my own but most of mine were actually much much lower than this. That bill above is for a month and it is around $7.50. Most of my water bills were around $5 a month or less. There was a period of time where if you had a water bill of less than 100 Baht (which was around $3 a month) the water company wouldn't even give you a bill and just let you have it for free.
There is the disadvantage of the water being non-potable but bottled drinking water service in containers that are sanitized and reused cost so little that this isn't a factor. Think about it... how much of the water that you use in your daily life really needs to be drinkable?
Never ending hot water machine
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When I was a kid we had 6 people in our household. If you took a shower that was "too long" it meant that someone else in the family was not going to have any hot water for their shower. This of course would irritate the other people and it was because although we had a relatively massive hot water heater in the basement, it has a limited capacity.
With this machine on the wall you will literally NEVER run out of hot water since it heats it up on the spot. I know that this is not specific to South East Asia and they are available all over the world. However, I had never seen one until I moved to this part of the world. I don't understand why we don't use them in the west, it must have something to do with energy efficiency.
The shower IS the bathroom
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For most households there is no division between where the shower is and where the rest of the bathroom is. The floor simply angles slightly towards the drain in the corner throughout the entire area. In this regard the "WC" is literally the "water closet." This has many benefits i enjoy such as the fact that cleaning up is really easy. You just spray down everything, do a scrub-a-dub and then spray everything down. All the gunk just goes away.
As a kid several of our bathrooms actually had carpeting in them, which in my mind is just insane. There are very few people that have bathtubs here and even when they do they are never those horrible plastic things that were in every apartment I ever had when I lived in USA.
The bum gun
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When we saw the USA scramble to buy up all the toilet paper in grocery stores back at the start of Covid we couldn't help but chuckle over here a bit because that really wouldn't be a factor over here. I actually flexed on my USA friends a bit online as I walked through the supermarket to the toilet paper aisle to show completely full shelves.
I don't need to get into the details about what this is for but let's just say that it works a whole lot better than roll upon roll of toilet paper does, not to mention the fact that it is far more environmentally friendly than using TP and also you are not going to end up in an embarrassing situation where you have clogged the crapper at your friend's house.
Everyone I know that has lived here for any amount of time ends up installing one of these in their homes back in USA when they return. Because it just makes sense.
Before I moved overseas I had this sense of superiority as a Westerner because my country and most of the European countries I was familiar with seemed to be so much further ahead as far as economics and technology was concerned. That is likely still the case but at least in this one specific area I think the USA and other countries have it all wrong and SEA has done it all right. I can't imagine why these things don't even appear to be an option back in the west and not only that, but people might think it is strange that you would have this.
If I am ever forced to live in the USA again at some point in my life I am definitely going to convert my bathroom to be like it is over here - It was odd to me at first but now the other way seems odd.