Embarrassing Story, So Naturally I Share!

Like the title says, I'm offering a special on embarassment--two countries for the price of one! It all began with the receipt of our pay and end of a rough school week. Paul had talked me in to watching "Invasion" with him and two of our roommates were going to Amigos, a trendy pseudo-Western restaurant (though why they picked Amigos, when they do not boast a single dish even remotely resembling Spanish/Mexican food, we may never know). We all combined plans and set out for the restaurant. Unfornuately, to fit dinner in before the movie, we had to leave the school in a hurry and I did not have a chance to use the restroom. I was not particularly concerned as restaurants promoting themselves as Western tend to have nice, Western-style restrooms. By Western-style, I mean they have toliets, not squatters. More about this later. Anyway, we found the restaurant, placed an order, and I set off to find the restroom. Alas, Amigos had the semi-combined restrooms that appear to be in vogue here. I went in the room to the left and the room to the right. The left room had what appeared to be tiny urinals, as did the right room. Finally, I picked the right room because it had pictures of flowers on the walls and men's rooms tend to be un-to-minimally adorned. Unfortunately, once I had settled on the room, I could not quite figure out what I was supposed to do. See, I had pictured squatters as true holes in the ground, while I was faced with tiny urinals turned on their backs and flush with the floor. While it was relatively easy to figure out what they were used for, it was much more difficult to determine how you used one. Ultimately, the last stall I opened was meant for the disabled and it did have a toliet. I chickened out and chose that stall. But the humiliation wasn't over. Oh, no. See, I went to wash my hands in the basin in the room, but there was no soap. Then I remembered the combined washing area and went out there. I found the soap, but was baffled because there were no sinks, only a large glass plate under the faucets. I was confused. Where you supposed to get your hands just wet enough for soap then wash off at the basin in the other room? How could this situation possibly ever work? It was a few panicked moments before I realized that the the glass was slightly slanted so the water would run down into a trough behind the mirror. I felt like an idiot. Then, just to really rub salt in my wounded pride, a pack of tiny Taiwanese children came up and began to make fun of me. Then their mothers' came, which did not stop the mocking, and they gave me funny looks, leading me to suspect that I was still in fact not doing things right. Literally, the only way the whole experience could have been worse would have been if I took out all the waiters and a lot of food as I fled the scene.