The Sweet Smell of Piss

So there isn't so much exciting going on right now. Matt has been working long hours (as usual), and I have been trying to plan for my/our future. Yesterday I applied for many jobs - including some that even interested me! I will wait to find out about all of them. I started contacting people in the Jewish community here, and so far they're super nice! We even have a shabbat dinner invitation for this weekend...

I also begin my SCUBA certification class tonight, and I look forward to that. Though the only time I have dived, which was in the Dominican Republic with Matt two years ago, I had very painful ears and a bloody nose...I really did enjoy it. It's pretty amazing to breathe underwater and see cool stuff. If all goes as planned I will be in the pool this weekend, and then the weekend of the 13th Matt and I will go to Malaysia to dive at an island off the east coast of the mainland.

We're also working on a trip to Thailand for the following weekend for our friend, Veena's wedding. Hopefully that will happen. It's SOO cheap to go! It seems like we will BOTH be able to fly to Bangkok for $187 US!! That's nuts...

Other than planning, not much is going on over here, so I have decided to write about the sweet smell of piss.

When we lived in New York (way back when...), and we would walk around during the summer, we smelled piss. It was hard to find a place that didn't smell at least a little bit like urine. I remember one time walking ten minutes and seven north south blocks and two east west blocks, and the ENTIRE time it smelled like piss. I would sometimes walk deep in Central Park just to get away from the smell. Lord knows that along Central Park West on the park side of the street was some of the worst smelling piss in the city!

Well...I haven't smelled that smell at all in the last two and a half weeks. There is no piss here. There are bathrooms all over the place! Anytime I think maybe I have to go, there's a bathroom, and they're ALWAYS clean! It's really unbelievable. There are bathrooms in pedestrian malls, there are bathrooms on every floor of every mall (and we all know that there are SERIOUS amounts of malls here!), and I would even bet that restaurants are legally obligated to let non-customers use them! It's really nice.

The other thing about bathrooms that I think is interesting is that most bathrooms here have automatic flushers. This isn't the interesting part. There are usually some toilets and some squatters. The squatters are like what Shana and I saw in Turkey and what you see in Sinai - a hole with two foot places to the side. I would bet that squatters were developed before toilets, YET, the squatters have automatic flushers!! If they're going to put in the automatic flushers, why don't they just put in toilets!? (Matt reminds me that some people aren't used to toilets, and they like what they know...fine).

It reminds me of this stand-up routine that I heard Seinfeld do. He was talking about chop sticks. He said, it's not like the Chinese haven't heard of the new development of the fork...It's similar, but funnier when he does it.

OH - and HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO JILL AND SARAH!!!! 29 is a biggie... (I should know, I'm almost halfway done!).