This post over at BoingBoing about the ubiquitous-in-the-non-western-world squat toilet reminded me of the mild anxiety I had about facilities before I got to the UAE, and how absurd that seemed after I arrived. See, the Emirates — especially Abu Dhabi and Dubai — are pretty new places, and very focused on foreigners. I saw no squat toilets as a result.

What I did see were the modern nods to the traditional “left hand and a bowl of water” approach still used by most of the planet, but without removing the modern facilities westerners would expect.

In my hotel it took the form of an unexpected addition: “Hey! A bidet!”

But elsewhere the facilities were much less continental. This is from an apartment in Dubai:

This amused me, but not in any culturally bigoted way. What tickled me was that even though the “water method” is by far the most popular approach there (I assume), the hardware used is a repurposed kitchen sprayer. It was like this in a fancy Dubai high-rise, and it was like this in the bathroom at the client office, and it was like this in the restrooms off the hotel lobby. You’d think there would be something purpose-built, but (short of the bidet in the hotel) I never saw anything else.

On an unrelated note, both showers I used over there were materially better than any American one I’ve ever seen. This is why:

The top (brass colored) knob controls bath-or-shower. The left-hand chrome knob controls water pressure only. The right-hand chrome knob controls temperature. You set the right knob once and leave it the hell alone. It’s a small thing, but holy CRAP why don’t I have this in my bathroom?