BATHROOMS & WET HANDS

22 December 2021 | Before I launch into ‘wet hands,’ it’s important to note that Singapore has bathrooms… everywhere. They are typically clean, modern, free and easily accessible. It’s one of those things that we almost take for granted now. Whereas in NYC, it was much harder to find a clean accessible bathroom unless you belonged to a gym or were near a mall or department store.

That said, one of the peculiarities of bathrooms in Singapore is the lack of paper towels. Very rarely will you ever find a paper towel in the city-state. They do have hand dryers but generally they are so weak that it doesn’t make sense to even bother with them.

So what do most people do, including us? Everyone washes their hands but most people walk out of the bathroom with wet hands. Or like us, they use their wet hands to style their hair or they wipe them on their clothes. But here’s the thing… paper towels really aren’t needed because the weather is typically so hot that hands dry within seconds anyway.

So, yes, we’ve gotten used to walking around with wet hands but really not for long.

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21 October 2020 | I wrote this post about wet hands back in 2020 and decided to include it below because my perspective a year ago was a bit different than today:

I could have included this in another Musings but it does merit it's own call-out as I sometimes feel like a perpetually walk around in Singapore with wet hands. While there are many public bathrooms in Singapore and while most of them are quite clean, for the life of me, you cannot find a paper towel to dry your hands. Many bathrooms have hand dryers but you'd have more luck blowing on your hands to dry them than using a hand dryer. Paper towels (likely because of waste and maintenance) is not a thing in Singapore.

And on a slightly separate bur related note, the paper towels that do exist in APAC suck. Even the brand names we know and love have wimpy towels that fall apart. So, most of the time, I just walk around with wet hands because, hey, it's so hot out here anyway that your hands will dry on their own within a matter of a minute or two. Hmmmm... maybe that's why they don't bother with drying hands?!