Please Do Not Stampede the Toilet

Today I visited a coffee shop and used their restroom, which is one of the nicest I've seen so far. They have two stalls for the women. One of them has the traditional squat toilet, and the other one has a western toilet.

I have grown to like the squat toilets because it's easier to hover and not have to touch anything. As weird as the squat toilet may seem to us westerners at first, it's starting to make good hygiene sense to me, and now I actually prefer them. I have a western toilet in my apartment, and I'm very very very happy about that, but in public restrooms I prefer the squat toilet.

At my kindergarten, the women's restroom has two stalls as well, one for the squat toilet and one for the western toilet. All of my coworkers prefer the squat toilet, which I didn't quite understand at first. The western toilet would be completely free, and still everyone would stand in line for the squat toilet. Now I get it.

Anyway, today at the coffee shop the squat toilet was in use so I used the western, and I saw this cute sign...


The sign says 请勿踩踏 (Qǐng wù cǎi tà), which the Google translation site translates literally to "Do not stampede."


Hee hee.

I tried to translate it again by retyping the characters into the site, and it translated it slightly differently to "Do not adopt step."

I guess either way it translates, point taken. But really, the picture was pretty clear. Although it does kind of seem like the foot is shouting at the toilet.

At first the sign seemed kind of strange, because why would they need to tell people to not stand on the toilet. But then I remembered a friend telling me that people do not like sitting on the western toilets, for the hygiene reason, so some people stand on the toilet seat, turning the western toilet into a squat toilet. A very tall squat toilet. Hmm, that could be pretty dangerous. Probably best to have a sign.