I remember back when I was in college and I worked at Pizza Hut and we all had to take turns checking and cleaning the bathrooms. It was something that all of hated doing for obvious reasons and since we had no full time janitor of sorts, it was a round robin type of duty that was assigned to everyone fairly. The manager would always come and check to make sure we had done a good enough job at the end of it as well.
Later in life I ended up owning a restaurant in Thailand and it was of paramount importance that the bathrooms be very clean and we checked on them several times a day. The reason for this was something that people say a lot in the food-service industry and I don't know if it it is true or not but the belief is that the customer will believe that a place with a dirty bathroom has a dirty kitchen and vice versa.
Well the other day we went to a place that had probably the nicest and cleanest bathrooms I've ever seen in my life.
Maybe it seems silly to some people to get excited about bathrooms and to those people I say that you probably haven't seen bathrooms in South East Asia. They tend to be a bit subpar in terms of cleanliness is concerned and some of them border on horrendous. Many of them don't even have soap which is probably illegal in my home country.
I only went into the men's room obviously, but according to the women in our group their bathrooms were just as nice and several people were commenting on how great it was - haha. I didn't even ask them about it and it was just something that came up in conversation organically. I would imagine that it is just as important for women and another aspect of South East Asian countries that drives women crazy is that as far as I can tell it is not required that places have separate bathrooms for men and women and you will even encounter the opposite sex in these places, which is kind of weird.
The men's room felt like a museum more than a place we keep toilets and there was plenty of soap and a really powerful hand dryer. It was also air-conditioned and this is the first place outside of an airport that I have experienced this in Vietnam. They even air-conditioned the place with the door posted open, which is horribly inefficient of course, but the establishment didn't seem to mind. They were willing to spend extra money on electric for the sake of comfort.
Unfortunately the food at the restaurant wasn't really that good and the service was damn near incompetent. At one point we had to have the Vietnamese speaking person in our party tell the manager that they had 2 minutes to get us cold beer or we were going to go to a different place. We were really irritated about them bringing us room-temperature beer when we had actually called them the night before and informed them that we were coming with a group of 15 people and we were heavy beer-drinkers. This lack of cold beer didn't happen on beer number 100 or anything silly like that, the very first round of beers were warm.
Thankfully they were able to sort it out and we ended up happy with most of the afternoon. We had mixed feelings about the actual meal, but everyone agreed that the bathrooms were out of this world.
Maybe it is a silly thing to get excited about but when you have lived in this part of the world for as long as I have you kind of expect all bathrooms to be disgusting.