My first shower in Taiwan left me feeling like I’d done something massively wrong. I’m led to believe that most Taiwanese people just have the one shower in the evening before bed.

I’m don’t quite understand the logic in this, other then perhaps wanting to keep your bed clean? I guess it’s probably something along the lines of having ‘house sandals’ and taking off your outside shoes at the door to keep the floor clean.

Oh and if you are coming here and don’t have children’s size feet expect to feel like your about to burst out of them at any time. I’m a size 9 and I can barely get two toes deep into any pair I’ve tried on, I’ll have to go out and buy a proper pair at some point.

…and then carry them around to every house I visit.

Because of the local custom of evening showers, the first challenge in having a shower in Taiwan is that not all places bother even turning the hot water on in the morning.

Initially staying in (budget) hotels I didn’t think this would be an issue but I still had to check after noticing on my first morning in Taiwan that there was no hot water action happening.

Armed with my trusty phrase book I asked the girl at the reception desk and was told that after turning on the hot water you had to wait 10-12 minutes. Coming from a land of perpetual drought this was more of a foreign concept then the local language.

So you turn on the hot water (full blast mind you as I believe anything less and the water heater doesn’t properly kick in) and then go do other stuff while litres of water waste down the drain. Being in a hotel you don’t have a garden or anything to recycle the water on so it’s a tad distressing.

The first place I stayed at seemed to have a particularly long wait time (the water system was probably older then most of the locals?), but once I got out a bit I found most places had hot water running in less then five minutes.

This wasn’t too bad but I still had the ‘four minute shower’ mantra rattling around inside my head. I guess living in a country with a seemingly abundance of water is something I’m just going to have to adjust to.

After you’ve had your shower comes the realization that you’ve forgotten to do something. For some inexplicable reason the draining system of the shower, unless it’s a bathtub combo, is never located you know… where the shower actually is.

Most of the time it’s within a meters distance of where the shower is but the worst I’ve seen was this bathroom:

This is the view point from where you actually take a shower. Although the bathroom was pretty small the photo makes everything appear a bit closer then it was.

However the toilet seat did get wet everytime you had a shower…

In this particular bathroom the shower was in one corner whilst the drain was over in the opposite. As you showered the water ran across ¾ of the bathroom leaving it soaked. The gradient leading to the drain was so slight that after your shower you were left with pools of water to walk around in.

Again I’ve got no understanding as to the logic behind this and I can’t see any practical reason for it either.

The reality of having the drain so far from the shower is that after having a shower you typically wind up with a wet bathroom floor for most of the morning. I guess if you’re having a shower just before bed you won’t care so much, unless of course you slip in the middle of the night on a toilet run.

This I’m guessing doesn’t happen enough to warrant public concern. However if someone told me wet toilets slips were the number one killer in Taiwan, well I wouldn’t pretend to be surprised.

Meanwhile personally speaking, sitting on the toilet with my feet getting wet instantly triggers memories of using public toilets back home and regretting not wearing waterproof shoes…