Bath-obsessed ancients (2016)

You've probably ever been in the middle east then...

Isn’t the Burj Khalifa not even hooked up to the sewer system so all the feces and urine is loaded onto trucks daily?

Also open air sewers are still common in a lot of places, an Iranian American friend of mine claimed he almost fell into one as a kid.

Some other interesting things from the article that stuck with me:

- Most toilets weren't connected to the sewers because they didn't want to have the smell of the sewers in their houses - The public latrines were considered a bad choice because of lack of privacy and shared spunges (based on texts on the walls) - The sewers were built mainly for the convenience of not having to transport water to and from within the city, not necessarily for hygiene reasons - Apparently some emperor did realize that it wasn't smart to bathe with sick and healthy people at the same time but decided the sick would bathe before the healthy

Of course, if you only wanted to know if they cleaned the water in bath houses sufficiently, then your summary suffices as well.

> A visit to the latrine was probably unpleasant and only for the desperate, according to archaeologist Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, author of The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy . She has looked into more Roman lavatories than most. Aside from the total lack of privacy, she notes, they were almost invariably dark, smelly and potentially dangerous. Noxious gases built up in the trench below and sometimes exploded, sending flames shooting up through the toilets.

It can't be worse than festival toilets on day three, after two days of mud and rain. What we don't know is how often the toilets were cleaned which would have made a big difference or if insense was burnt. The Romans were into perfume in a big way.

I attended Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival several years. It's held in NY state for four or five days in July, with people on-site longer for setup and teardown. While I was there, I marveled at many things, e.g., the music, the friendliness of the people, and the cleanliness of the outhouses.