The Toilet Story

One day I had an epiphany. The bathroom might smell so bad since we hadn't cleaned the toilet since we had gotten there. I mentioned it to Patrick. His response was something along the lines of: "Oh, you have to clean toilets? I thought that was a germaphobic American thing." I explained that it wasn't and that we should clean the toilet. Now, I must tell you that almost every toilet I have seen in China has some sort of black nastiness at the bottom of the bowl. In our toilet the bowl did not hold water. When you flushed it simply just rinsed everything down the pipes and drained all the water out of the bowl. Because of this, I thought that the black stuff at the bottom of our toilet bowl was mold or something. I grabbed the toilet brush and some toilet bowl cleaner that we had just picked up from the market across the street. I began cleaning the toilet just like anyone else would. Put in the cleaner and insert the brush. This is when I realized that this toilet had probably never been cleaned...

With the first sweep of the brush down the bowl a huge sheet of "mold" came unattached from the porcelain. I thought I would vomit. This "mold", as I originally and probably hopefully thought, was actually petrified fecal matter. After gaining my composure I flushed the sheet of feces down the toilet and started the cleaning process again. At this point Dave was walking out the door and asked what we were doing. I explained that we were cleaning the toilet. He said, "Oh, I just cleaned that a week ago." Patrick and I responded with, "No, because a huge sheet of crap just came loose." Dave's response: "Oh, well I didn't clean the INside of it, I wiped off the OUTside of it." (Gee, Dave, you're bright!) After the first wipe and flush the toilet started to look cleaner but there was still a lot of black stuff at the bottom towards the S pipe's opening. I gave up on the toilet brush since it was too big to get into the pipes. I rolled up my sleeves and directed Patrick to grab me a shoe polishing brush (which we had purchased to clean the rest of our apartment) and bleach. I grabbed this brush covered in bleach and began scrubbing the bowl of our toilet. I wasn't making much headway and asked Patrick for a toothbrush so I could get further in bowl without having to actually put my hands in the very bottom. I got a little more of the black nastiness to come out. After flushing the toilet again I asked for a pencil. It was similar to a drawing pencil in the way that it had no eraser on the end. I used the top of the pencil and started scraping the bottom of the bowl. All of a sudden flakes of what I prefer to think of as mold started flying off the porcelain. Because this pencil was quite short I was dangerously close to having this "mold" all over my hands and arms since I was now practically crawling into the toilet. At the sight of these flakes flying off I got so nauseous that I had to quit. Patrick grabbed a Flathead screwdriver and gave it a shot. He also couldn't deal with the thought of having hands shoved in the toilet and quit. After repeatedly washing my hands, bleaching them, and Purelling them I decided that I am done cleaning this apartment.