For almost an entire year, my husband Dennis and I have been remodeling a 76-year-old home while living in it full-time. A kitchen remodel, adding built-in bookcases to the living room and office, adding a butler’s pantry, adding plantation shutters, updating old bathrooms, painting everywhere, updating a daylight basement as a media room for watching football and movies, and a complete rehaul of the master suite. Not to mention wallpaper (so glad that is coming back into fashion) to update original guest baths and the downstairs powder room. Outdoors was hectic as well – a new roof to replace the leaking copper one over a sunroom, new gutters, a “gut and redo” to turn a bait shack down by the river into my new writing shack, an outdoor kitchen and fireplace. In three weeks’ time we will hit the one-year anniversary of buying the house and we are ALMOST finished.
But what does any of this have to do with a magic toilet?
During the remodel one of my girlfriends told me I “had to” put a super toilet in our master bath. You know the kind – heated seat, a bidet as well as a toilet, all sorts of automatic stuff. Dennis said no way was he putting any of his body parts over a contraption like that, so we only installed a new “regular” toilet.
And then we went to Asia where I encountered the magic toilet at the Pan Pacific Hotel in Hanoi.
Oh My Buddah!! Heated seats. And buttons to push for “cleaning” in the front and the back of your “bee-hind.” With the touch of a finger, you could move the warm water back and forth while you sat on the magic toilet. Who needed TP?
One of the incongruencies about Asia and toilets is that in many public places the toilets are still a hole in the ground. Yes, there is a stall for privacy, but when you enter there isn’t a toilet, only a hole. Fine for men, but for women? Another oddity is that people don’t talk about going to the bathroom. Instead, in Vietnam, if you are a woman you need to “sing a song” and if you are a man you need to “shoot a rabbit.” In Cambodia you look for a “happiness place.” But in the Pan Pacific Hotel in Hanoi you can have a magic toilet in your hotel bathroom.
Since returning home I have tried to talk Dennis into replacing our regular toilet with a magic one, but he has resisted. And you can imagine why.