The first time I saw that
someone had been led to this blog by entering the search terms “do Lebanese use
toilet paper” I chuckled. It’s a perfectly legitimate question, of course, but
I was surprised to find that it had preyed on someone’s mind to the point that
they took to the internet in search of answers. (I was equally surprised that
Google supplied my blog address in the search results but perhaps I shouldn’t
have been, all things considered.)
The second time those same
search terms cropped up in my blog I thought, “Huh, what do you know, there it is again”.
When I saw them for the
third time (but in a slightly more focused form – “do Lebanese men use
toilet paper”) I thought, “Okay, either a whole bunch of people really need to
know the answer to this or there is one person trying week after week to put an
end to the question that is consuming him body and soul.”
I don’t actually know how
many times these search terms have led some poor, disappointed sap to my blog.
It might be many. I don’t look at the Search Keywords list in my traffic
sources page very often because it depresses me. I always see that people have
come to my blog after Googling such terms as " lice from haircut" or "showed up
for party on wrong day" and I know that they will be as disappointed to reach
my blog as I am to learn that they didn’t mean to come here. (Just between you
and me, what exactly are people hoping to discover when they search for "showed up
for party on wrong day"?) In the beginning I used to scan the list eagerly,
hoping to see that people were finding me by typing in things like “embittered
sarcastic but deep down good-hearted expat living in Lebanon blog” but no one
ever did. I didn’t even see terms like “expat Lebanon”. It was, and remains, the lice,
wrong party day or toilet paper.
Well, I can’t answer the
lice question with any authority and I don’t know what to tell you people who
show up to parties on the wrong day. (Try harder next time? I show up on the
wrong day myself sometimes and I think it makes me a bit of a clod, frankly.)
But I can answer the question of whether or not Lebanese use toilet paper.
They do use it, but they’re
not totally dependant on it the way we Canadians are because they use water to
do the cleaning. The toilet paper is mainly for drying. Most toilets in Lebanon
have a sprayer hose rigged up at the side and when you’ve done your business
you turn the sprayer onto your relevant bits. Now, it’s not as easy as it sounds
because the holes on the sprayer head are pretty small and the water comes out
with quite a bit of force. You can soak your pants, half the room and most of
your shirt if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Lebanese people also use
bidets, but these are found only in homes, not in public bathrooms. The old
kind of bidets that sprayed straight up from the bottom were a far superior
design, in my opinion, to the new ones which have a faucet at the back. What is
this supposed to do? Are we meant to clean our bum cheeks? I don’t know about
the majority of people but when I sit down on a bidet the bit I want to clean
is on the bottom, not around at the back like some kind of birdhouse.
Some people use soap during
the washing process, some don’t. If your water pressure is high you don’t
really need soap, though you don’t want the jet too strong. If you’ve
ever used an old hose sprayer which has bad calcium build-up and is down to
about four open holes you will have experienced what I like to call “the
needles”, a vivid reminder that water can cut concrete.
Men and women both use the
above washing methods and they both use toilet paper to dry with (some have
little personal towels hung by the bidet in their own homes). When you remember
that you can’t flush toilet paper down the toilet in most buildings in Lebanon
you will readily appreciate the bonus of having relatively clean toilet paper
filling the wastebasket.
It’s hard to know what’s
too little information on any subject and what is too much, but I sense that this time you might have been happy with less. Most of you will
not have relished such toileting details – I doubt you’ve even read as
far as this -- but hopefully you’ll understand that I had to help that person
out there who can’t sleep at night for wondering.
You know what’s going to
happen now that I’ve written this post, of course. My blog was already coming
up in Google searches for Lebanese toilet paper concerns and now I will have
reinforced that relevance, probably raising it to some kind of position of
prominence on the results list. On the other hand, I have answered the
question so at least it will no longer be a fruitless visit to my blog
for those seeking these toilet paper truths. Well, I’m here to serve. Expat ear wax
queries, concern about sebum production in the Lebanese population, whatever it
is just go ahead and ask me.