That’s got’a smell yummy.
The image above is a small portion of a photo that will send a chill down the spine of agoraphobics.
But not one of the crowd we’re actually talking about? The URL suggests it dates from 2008.
Not to besmirch the train stations of an entire nation, but the most disgusting bathroom I’ve ever seen, by far, was at a Nanjing train station. I’d hate to see the competition.
Good eye.
That is from February 1st, 2008.
But it’s still of Guangzhou? Is this a regular thing at Guangzhou?
Dunno?
The one from 2008 is also captured in the heartbreaking documentary “Last Train Home” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1512201/)
Part of it is just the mass of people trying to get home for the holidays. Chinese New Year is the big holiday, everyone goes home to see their family. Moving that many people is going to be crazy. And if there is bad weather like there was in 2008 its going to be chaos.
A crowd that big and dense is one loud noise or whiff of smoke away from a catastrophe. If people in it panic, there is simply no way for it to quickly exit the building without people being trampled.
And that’s just the line for the bathroom.
It takes less than that to start a panic. One jostle begets one shove. It’s like how a traffic jam can get started from nothing except crowding and chaos theory. I am amazed there weren’t fatalities.
EDIT: Chinese media. Never mind.
I don’t know…I’ve been staring at that photo for forever and I still can’t find Waldo.
Oh, The Huge Manatee.
Captain Obvious. Duh.
The worst I’ve been in was at a highway service area and truck stop in Inner Mongolia. Horribly bleak, cold and windswept place. The men’s toilets were completely awash with urine and there was foul liquid faeces running between piles of solid poop in the tiled gutter that served as a combined urinal and squat toilet area. No privacy barriers. Shit up all the walls. Unbelievable stench.
Got back to the bus and described our experience, fully expecting the ladies facilities to have been better cared for; only to be told we were lucky because at least ours didn’t have congealing period blood and discarded soiled female sanitary products scattered all over in addition … 
I have nightmares about crowds like that, and being stuck in the middle of them. (shudder)
I wonder how long they had been waiting when that photo was taken. Some of them seemed very happy.
My worst experience was in a nightclub located in a squatted building in Bangkok. There was a small room with a big stone trough urinal. Since it was a squat I guess I could have expected the state of the urinals would be bad, but I was overwhelmed by just how bad it had gotten.
Usually when there is a bad smell I just sort of close my nose and breathe trough my mouth, that has gotten me trough like, 95% of all bad smells I’ve ever encountered, without smelling them at all. Here that trick was useless. I thought I’d though it out, I was wrong, I would have vomited if I had stayed in there for a second longer then the maybe 5 seconds I spent in there.
Although I do not envy @aeon. That sounds horrible, and at least there the smells must have been blown away by the winds a little, but he did not have the luxury, like I had, to just step outside and urinate in the bushes.
Whenever I come home from an Asian city, it feels like the opening scene of 28 Days Later.
I went through this station at the end of (I think) 1994. It wasn’t quite as insane as the picture, but it was really bad. The police had scattered stands around the crowd, akin to a lifeguard stand on the beach. From their position up high, they would (apparently randomly) strike nearby people with a long bamboo-type stick/cane. It was INSANE.
I had not purchased a ticket from this station to Hong Kong and this was one of the few times in China that I thought, “Thank goodness I’m a foreigner.” This was the last year that foreign exchange certificates (外汇卷) were used in China and I was able to go to the special window and get my ticket there and avoid most of the madness.
