Of showers and other things

Warning: People who don't care about my personal hygiene (IE, everyone) will find today's entry somewhat dull. BUT...

I had my first hot shower today!!

Most houses here don't have those fridge-sized hot water heaters in the basement (actually, no one in Mumbai lives in a house, it's all apartments anyway, much like Manhattan). Hot water comes from a milk gallon-size metal geyser (pronounced "geezer") attached to the wall inside the shower. When you want to shower, you turn the geyser on. When you're done, you turn it off. I came across the same arrangement when I stayed in a farming town in Costa Rica.

Many people still take "bucket-showers." A bucket-shower sounds like a prison punishment, but it's actually a water-efficient method of showering. The origin is, of course, in India's rural past, when people carted their water in from the fields. The showerer (showee?) fills a ten-gallon bucket with hot water. They use a little plastic cup to dispense the water over their head and various parts. The only drawback is that the showerer only has one hand free at a time for soap and other implements.

Despite the dexterity required, I've taken a bucket shower once or twice when I was traveling in rural India and had no option. I used about 1/100th of the water I'd have used in the States. The illustration was stark.

But enough about buckets. My uncle's house has overhead showers, although getting the right water temperature remained a mystery to me until recently. I was showering in my cousin's room, and the geyser never gets all that warm. Because I'm fond of traipsing about in rainforests and rural areas, I've taken plenty of cold showers. (The coldest was at a hill station in Costa Rica. They siphoned water directly out of the mountain streams.) I figured India was the same way, and the geysers just never got very hot.

But today I switched bathrooms and found, to my surprise, that this was not the case. Hurray!