The nightmare of a drainless floor

By Rasha Almaqaleh

Last summer, I attended a seminar in Wetzlar, a town in western central Germany. One of my observations on that trip was a drain in the bathroom floor which was attached to the room where I stayed during my visit. That really struck me because I’d never seen before a floor drain in a bathroom in Europe. So, when I wrote a blog about my visit to Wetzlar, I made sure to include the drain note in my post.

When one of my relatives read that blog, she was puzzled by that piece of information and couldn’t imagine how a bathroom lacks a drain on its floor. Her puzzlement was actually understandable because in Yemen, where I grew up, all bathrooms and kitchens have floor drains and the floors are usually sloped to the drain.

 That being the case, I myself expected when I first moved here that this was the deal in every bathroom and kitchen around the globe! But I was alarmed when I found out that bathrooms here don’t have floor drains. After all, doesn’t it make perfect sense for these two rooms in the house to have a floor drain? Bathrooms and kitchens have water sources and one gets a little splashy in there. And what happens exactly if there is, for some reason, an overflow in the bathroom? Without a drain on the floor, the water will simply flow out of the bathroom door ruining everything in its way.

I didn’t know how unpleasant this situation could be until I had myself a flooded bathroom at our place. With the absence of a drain, it took me forever to dry out the floor with the mop and all the available cleaning cloths and towels. If this happens in Yemen, I would simply slide a squeegee on the floor and collect the water into the drain.

But regardless of the water sources and the possibility of having an overflow accident, bathrooms in the Western countries are not expected to be wet places. They are designed with some adjustments to make them as dry as a bone. The shower for example is normally separated from the rest of the bathroom: it has a curb and a sealed cabin which prevents water from splashing onto the floor.

Besides, westerners don’t usually use bidet sprays after using the toilet, instead they use toilet paper to wipe down. In Yemen, we usually have bidet showers near the toilet as water is essential in the cleaning process. In some old-fashioned households, there is usually a faucet right next to the toilet and people put a bucket with a mug for rinsing.  

Another big difference between bathrooms in Yemen and in Europe is the bathroom slippers. While Westerners usually go to the bathroom barefoot, people in Yemen use slippers; these are plastic shoes placed at every bathroom door in the house so people could put them on when entering the bathroom and take them off when leaving. 

It is very common in Yemen, especially in modern residential buildings, to have two types of toilets in one bathroom: squat and sitting toilets.  However, squat toilets can be sometimes seen in Western countries but that would only be in public restrooms. During my stay in Europe I saw squat toilets two times, one in the migration office in Karlsruhe, a city in southwestern Germany and the other in the main train station in an Italian city at the Italian-Swiss border.

Squat toilet in Karlsruhe, Germany

Squat toilet in Varese, Italy

All in all, moving between different cultures makes the smallest details more striking than the big ones. This small detail could be anything, including a non-significant hole on a bathroom floor. You come then to realize that what you have taken for granted for so long, some people on other parts of the world can’t imagine it exists!