Tuesday 15 May 2012

Etiquette

After a few months, I'm still in Hong Kong, but only after I spent a week in Yunnan province visiting Kunming, Dali and Lijiang cities in western China and going to Malaysia for five days.

In both China and Malaysia, a popular form of toilet is the squatting toilet. There is a certain etiquette to this toilet type. You can't squat too far back or else when you're doing business #2 or else your business won't end up in the bowl. But you can't squat too far in front when you're doing business #1 or you'll spray everywhere (yes I've had all this happen to me). Cultural differences: in most facilities in China you have to provide your own paper, and in Malaysia there is an extra bum-cleaning nozzle spray you can use.
My aunt and I (or her family already has this system) came up with a public toilet rating system with 1 being the worst, dingy dirt-infested communal squats and 5 being the cleanest, most private and most facility-loaded toilets.

What attracts me to Malaysia is its multiculturalism. Whereas Canada's multiculturalism is a current of soft assimilation to Canadian values along with similar people tending to stick to their own groups, with the odd people mixing here and there, there's much more mixing of cultures in Malaysia. It's evident in the food, the people on the streets, the multilingualism etc.

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