“Have you checked the CDC website?” my wife asks me.
I’m sitting at the dining room table, bent over my laptop, reading all the latest travel advisories for our destination. “Not yet,” I say. “I’m checking the State Department to see if there are any travel warnings.”
“Check the World Health Organization too,” she says. “I want to know if we need any shots.”
“All right.” I sift through pages of disease symptoms and causes, the more I read the more nervous I become.
Where are we going? A foreign country? An exotic locale on the other side of the world? Some remote location beyond the reach of cell phones, laptops, and the Internet? No. It’s our neighbor’s. And they haven’t cleaned their bathroom since the year I graduated high school.
I flip through a series of trip reports left by previous travelers. “A strain of polio from 1850 has been found on the rim,” I say.
“Ugh.”
“Several species of viruses and bacteria in the hand towels.”
“No surprise there. What else?”
“Still looking.”
You think I’m exaggerating? You don’t believe that Biff and Mindy would maintain their guest bathroom like a nineteenth century outhouse? Think again. Remember: this isn’t the one they use. That bathroom is upstairs. This is the one reserved for the peons, the little people, the guests. A different standard applies.
We have to perform our due diligence. We’ve been to this home before. We know the dangers that lurk in a foreign bathroom. Our last visit scarred us for life: a toilet seat they hadn’t swapped in twenty years; a bowl they hadn’t cleaned in months, the same germ-infested towel they’d let hang for weeks.
I check the Google Bathroom Map, an overview of bathroom hot spots around the world. “Cockroach colony behind the vanity,” I say.
My wife massages her temple. “I don’t know if I can leave the house,” she says.
I start Excel and open our foreign bathroom checklist. “We’ll have to bring the seat covers, toilet paper-“
“-hand sanitizer, paper towels,” she says. I can tell a migraine is about to wallop her. “Is it all worth it?”
I shrug.
Sometimes, it takes an act of tremendous bravery to enter a foreign world, especially a foreign bathroom. It may not be far from home; it may only be next door. You just don’t know. It’s only when you close the door, turn on the light, and inhale that you can know for sure. But by then it’s too late. You’re out of choices.
How about you? Have you visited a foreign bathroom lately? What are your survival secrets?
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