This entire post is about the toilet museum

If you don't want to read an entire post about toilets and the toilet museum, then consider yourself warned and stop reading now :)

Ok great, I guess you want to hear about the toilet museum!  We took our first bicycle rickshaw from the metro station to the museum.  Here is a picture from inside:

And here we are (sorry for the terrible photo):

The flush toilet was designed hundreds of years ago, but obviously we are still perfecting it:

Here's Sam learning some interesting and funny toilet facts:

If you can't read this and haven't seen this one before, the top stall is labeled Management and the bottom stall is labeled Employees:

And now for a bunch of pictures of toilets.  This one incinerates the waste, leaving almost nothing behind, but it uses a ton of energy to do it:

This one has all sorts of fancy settings for the toilet seat:

I think these are a bunch of fancy chamber pots:

 

 

That last one may be the golden commode.  Here is a throne that is secretly also a toilet:

 And here is one that is disguised as a fancy comfy chair:

Here's a toilet with armrests:

Here are some fancy flower urinals:

This is a building in the shape of a toilet:

This might have been my favorite thing.  This is a public toilet in Switzerland that has walls made out of one way mirror glass, so you can't see in from outside, but you can see everything going on around you from inside:

Another public toilet.  This one cleans itself after every use, and you can't be in there longer than 15 minutes or it will clean you too:

This one is urinals that have great views while you're using them:

A tent toilet:

I believe this one is intended to be a biodegradable toilet:

Here is a toilet that is disguised as a table when it's not in use:

This one is disguised as a stack of books, but I'm not sure who could use such a tiny toilet:

Here I am with a model of a building where every single room is a bathroom.  It's near a temple that I guess is very popular, so it needs a lot of bathrooms:

There was a list of how people react when they smell something stinky around the world:

And some tips for how to make yourself have to go or be able to hold off when you need to go to the bathroom:

I think this is the real golden commode:

Haha:

There were a bunch of funny bathroom jokes:

And in case you were thinking they were crude or not funny, here is what they have to say:

And here's a toilet-trained elephant, which I have to imagine is very useful for its trainers:

This door is entirely made out of human poo, dried out and put into this shape.  According to the guy at the museum, only about 5% of the mass is left after you dry out the poo.

And then I think outside they might be trying to sell bathroom modules.  Here are some of the options:

Then there's this:

And near the entrance is a statue of Gandhi, so Sam went on a walk with him:

The Tel Aviv Half Marathon in 90 degree heat!

Here we are after finishing the run! As you can see, the location is pretty spectacular, finishing along the beaches of the Mediterranean.

On Friday, Caroline and I completed the Tel Aviv Half Marathon in 2 hours and 24 minutes. This isn't exactly a world record (or even a Pals record - way to go Keith and Alan!), but we were pretty happy with it. Because of the heat, the whole process was quite an adventure.

When we originally signed up, the full Marathon kick-off time was 6:30am and our group of the half marathon was supposed to start at 7:30am. However, as the day of the race drew nearer and the forecast temperature looked to be higher and higher, the race organizers first decided to move everything up by half an hour, and then took more drastic measures. With the temperature expected to pass 90F early in the day, they decided to postpone the full Marathon until next weekend, and our start time got moved to 6am (with other groups starting even earlier!).

On the one hand, I was definitely appreciative of the change because it meant that we could finish the whole run before the asphalt started melting under our feet. On the other hand, we had planned to catch an early train from Haifa to Tel Aviv before the race, and with the earlier start time, this plan was not gonna work.

At first we considered staying in a Tel Aviv hostel, but it wasn't all that cheap or close, and they only had dorm beds available...and it just seemed like the night before running 21km isn't the time to get a lousy night of sleep. So in the end, we splurged and booked a room in the beachfront Sheraton using my hotel points from the consulting days. It was worth it, since it put us close to the race, we slept well, and we got to enjoy a nicer room after the race was over.

We arrived at the hotel on Thursday night and pretty much went straight to sleep. We woke up at 5am and started walking to the starting line by 5:30am. Even though the sun was just barely up, it already felt like a hot day. It was at least 70F by this time already.

I took this photo to capture how we felt walking to the race at 5:30am. It turned out really blurry, but maybe that helps show how we felt :)

The slogan of the race was "Non-stop party," and sure enough, even as we approached the starting line at a quarter to 6am, we could hear blasting club music from a distance away. As we found our place in the corral, it started to feel very exciting. There were 15,000 people in our race alone, the music was pumping us up, and this was going to be my first half marathon!

The race began and we took off - probably a bit too fast at first because of the excitement. Soon enough, we settled into a groove and just focused on enjoying the run. One of the downsides to a race that starts at 6am is there aren't a lot of people out cheering for you! We had a few people clap and cheer, and a group of kids on a balcony were shouting "yay! no school today!" because the roads were closed.

There were music stages placed throughout the race. Some of them were just loudspeakers playing a good beat to get you pumped up, but some had performers too. There were a couple rock bands, and outside the symphony hall there was even a kind of bluegrass group with violin. It doesn't exactly get you fired up to run fast, but it was still nice to have them out there.

The course was really beautiful for the most part. We were running on the main thoroughfares of Tel Aviv, and through some nice parks and finishing along the coast. Thanks to the buildings, most of the course was shaded so even as it got hotter we weren't exposed to the sun for kilometers on end.

The run started to show some problems in the second half, however, at the water stations. The water stations were very well-staffed, but they seemed to be running out of something. I'm not sure if it was water or cups, but we would often run past 4 or 5 tables with no water before finding a volunteer near the end of the water station who still had a cup or two remaining. I don't think we ever found without water when we wanted it, but it was a little stressful to pass table after table, not sure if there would be water farther on. I worry that the problem was even worse for runners coming later on.

Caroline and I both started to slow down a bit as we were approaching the turn onto the final 4 kilometer stretch on the waterfront, but then we encountered the 2:20 pace guy! This race featured a bunch of pace runners, who will run a fairly steady pace to finish at a certain time. You just find the guy whose vest says the time you want, and then you stick with him as best you can!

Just as our energy was starting to flag, Caroline challenged us to keep up with the 2:20 pace guy. We definitely had to pick up our pace a bit, but we stayed with him for about 3 kilometers (looking at our Strava splits, you can see where we sped up for mile 12 and 13). However, as we passed the 20km marker, the pace runner started to speed up, I think in order to make his 2:20 time. Some of the other runners with him kept up, but we couldn't kick it up another notch and we let him go.

The last kilometer seemed to go on forever, but we finally made it! The post-race situation was not really ideal. We had to walk quite a long time after the finish line before the water, and then the only food we could find in the post-race fair was yogurt. It was really good yogurt, but not exactly what we were craving after a huge exertion. Caroline suspected that maybe the yogurt company had a family connection with the race organizers so they could block out any other food sponsorships :)

We did it! Here we are enjoying our post-race yogurt.

After some time to rest our legs, we slooooooowly made our way back to the hotel. From there, we rested, showered and changed into our bathing suits. Because after all, a 90 degree day isn't great for running, but it sure is a great day to enjoy the beach!

More pictures from India

Sorry this post is not current, but it took a while to get things organized with pictures and getting around to writing this up.  I hope you like it!

After a few days in Delhi, we started our tour of the Golden Triangle.  Technically Delhi is part of the Golden Triangle, which also includes Agra, which is where the Taj Mahal is, and Jaipur, which is a cool city that has a lot of old stuff, including the Amber Fort.  Between Agra and Jaipur is another place called Fatehpur Sikri, which was the capital of the Mughal empire and has a bunch of similar-looking architecture.  The Taj Mahal will have its own separate post coming later (even though we saw it before this stuff).

• So from Agra, we drove to Fatehpur Sikri (capital of the Mughal empire).  When we got there, we went to a parking lot and from there took a tuk-tuk (rhymes with the word took) or autorickshaw to the site of the fort/palace.  This was the only time we took one of these, and boy was it bumpy!

• Some pictures from inside:

• Inside that white building is a tomb where some special guy is buried.  From what I understand, he helped one of the rulers have a son (Shah Jahan, maybe?).  People go there to make wishes by tying strings to this grate:

• Another way to make wishes is by putting a piece of fabric on the tomb.  Of course, you have the option to buy string or fabric to use to make a wish.  "Small fabric, small price.  Medium fabric, medium price.  Big fabric, big price."  Of course, the process is that you buy the fabric, then put it on there, then they take it off in a few minutes and sell it to the next person.  They say the money goes to women and children for charity, but who really knows.  And it's a hard sell.  We did not buy any of this, fabric or story.

• To go into the room with the tomb, you need to cover your head, so here is Sam with a basket that they lent him to cover his head.  It's not actually a basket, but you could use it as one.  It was plastic.

• A cool view from inside, where you can see how the screen is see-through from the darker side (inside).  You can't see in very well from outside, and this is what women would sit behind to watch things going on outside:

• A typical view of India:

• The highways were very interesting.  Look at this truck that looks like it's overflowing:

• We drove from Fatehpur Sikri to Jaipur, which was a great city.  We did all sorts of things there, including barfing (just for me).  We rode an elephant:

• Saw the Hawa Mahal:

• Visited the Amber Fort

• Here is a picture of a door from the Amber Fort for Jenn:

• This carving in the marble is cool because it has parts of like 9 different kinds of animals if you cover up the right areas.  For example, on that flower at the top, if you cover up the outside part of it, you can make the middle look like an elephant trunk, or if you cover up a little bit more, it is like a lion's tail.  I can't remember all of them, unfortunately.

• The best part of the Amber Fort is the Sheesh Mahal (yes, that's really the name).  Sheesh means mirror and Mahal means palace, so this is the Mirror Palace.  It's almost as amazing as the Taj Mahal, because it's entirely covered in little mirrors.  Here's us reflecting in one of them:

• And here are some more pictures from the Sheesh Mahal:

• We also drove by the Jal Mahal, or Lake Palace.  It's a palace built in a lake!  I think during the dry season sometimes there isn't a lake there, or else maybe it's a man-made lake?  I can't remember for sure.  But it's incredible to see:

• And here's a picture of thali, which is something we ate.  As best as I can tell, it just means this type of combination, not any particular part of it.

• We finished up with the Jantar Mantar which is essentially an observatory from the 17th century that is still accurate today.  Sam loved it a lot.  It was really cool looking:

•  And it has the largest sundial in the world (pictures with us for scale):

• Here I am by the Aquarius station:

• And then we went to the City Palace and museum, which had some more pretty stuff:

• It has the 2 largest silver vessels in the world, which were constructed when some ruler wanted to bring his own water to England because he didn't trust the water there:

• And finally, here I am with a cannon: