Your standard travel article presents the best a destination has to offer: the coolest clubs, balmiest beaches, most magnificent museums. This is not that article.
For a nation as obsessed with cleanliness as Singapore, this place has some pretty filthy bathrooms. If you find yourself hunting for toilets in the City of Lions, there are some things you'll need to know.
First and foremost, public urination is a bad idea. This isn't New York City—you won't find Singaporean policemen watering the alleys behind bars, and you don't want them finding you with your pants around your ankles. The fine here is $1000SGD.
A cheaper alternative is the public bathroom. In a nation of hawker centers and shopping malls, these havens aren't hard to come by. That said, they're not always ideal.
Singapore is a city without paper towels. Napkins are nowhere to be found, and packets of tissues—sold by old aunties and uncles on the street—are more often used to chope (reserve) tables than to wipe hands. In most bathrooms, you'll find an empty paper towel dispenser (the relic of some bygone era) next to an entirely impotent hand dryer. Expect the floor to be wet, and hope that the wet is just water.
Beware the dreaded squat toilet. Singapore is a multicultural city, and many of its bathrooms will include at least one of these Westerner-vexing latrines. You may want to start working those calf muscles—if you're feeling urgent and the other stalls are occupied, you're gonna wish you'd done more lunges.
More often than not, the use of a hawker center bathroom carries a nominal fee. When you have to pee, every second counts, so to avoid losing precious time trading change with restroom attendants, hold onto your 10 cent coins.
If you're out of cash and in sprinting distance of an MRT station, you'll find a free bathroom there. Some of these restrooms are fine, some are kinda gross, and one has caused me irreparable emotional damage.
On the way back from Tekka Market after an evening abundant with vindaloo and beer, my buddy Sam and I both needed a bathroom, bad. Stepping off the escalator in the Little India MRT, I groaned at the sight of the disorderly queue that wound far from the restroom door.
Gritting my teeth and tightening my pelvic floor muscles, I felt a sudden great empathy for the women in my life – so this is what it feels like to have to wait to pee! I took comfort in the assumption that my wait would be over soon after reaching the bathroom door.
False.
Thirty people, four urinals, no lines. Just chaos, a slick yellow floor, and the wretched stench of human waste.
Dancing in place, waiting for strangers to pay their respects to the porcelain gods, I noticed Sam disappear into a stall to take care of more laborious business.
After an eternity of fidgeting, I came face to face with a urinal. Finally! Choking back a sigh of relief, I unzipped my fly.
Then it happened.
Driven by some unearthly malice, the toilet before me began to gurgle and spit urine like a lawn sprinkler. The yellow waterfall splashed to the floor, spattering my legs and gushing over my sandals. I screamed.
Leaping back, I cut the queue to the next urinal. As I emptied my bladder, I watched a man shove his way through the crowd, enter a squat toilet stall where another man was already peeing, and proceed to urinate all over the wall.
Gagging from the pee fumes and on the verge of a nervous breakdown, I rinsed my hands in the (soapless) sink, flicked some water at my shins, and fled from the restroom.
Soon Sam emerged, shaking his head in disgust.
I greeted him: “Someone else's pee is on my legs.”
Sam groaned. “I was sitting on the toilet,” he explained, “trying not to drop my shorts 'cause there was brown stuff on the floor, when someone started punching the door to the stall and screaming! I said I was in there, but he just kept punching the door!”
I repeated myself, as if by voicing the words I could somehow render them untrue: “Someone else's pee is on my legs.”
One last tip: wherever you may find yourself dropping your trousers, don't find yourself in the bathroom of the Little India MRT.