Rub-a-dub-dub Spider in my tub...

It is surprising how many varieties of showers there are.  High end showers come complete with marble walls and a hundred or so faucets shooting water at you from every angle.  I imagine the resultant experience might be something akin to getting caught in a monsoon.

On the lower end of the spectrum are the fiberglass showers with only one faucet shooting water at you from one boring angle.

While most Americans might be depressed to have the latter, I still find myself thanking God for my simple, one-faceted shower.

I find my gratitude after experiencing the unforgettable quandary of a Brazilian shower.  Most Brazilian showers are tiled and attached to the shower nozzle is an electrical box that looks like it shouldn’t be anywhere near a shower—let alone in it.

This is the heating element which heats the shower water as it passes through the box, since most Brazilian homes don’t have water heaters.  The higher the water pressure the cooler the water, thus thrusting upon you the quandary of either high water pressure, or hot water, because you sure can’t have both.

I generally ended up settling for something akin to a light-ish warm rain, which wasn’t particularly good for getting the shampoo out of my waist-length hair.  I might have complained then, but soon looked back with fondness as things only got worse when we moved to the jungle in the northern part of Brazil.

We had to build our house and moved in long before it was ready because we had no place else to stay.  This meant we had one bathroom with a toilet and nothing else in it.  The shower was a black plastic 3x3 foot enclosure on the back porch.  This faucet didn’t even have a heating element of any kind.

Even if we had been tempted to linger in the plastic shower, the cold water hastily reminded us to get in and get out with supersonic speed.  The other added benefit was that black plastic attracts spiders.  Very large ones.  There is nothing quite as unpleasant as reaching for the shampoo with icy water pouring down your back and finding an eight-legged voyeur looking up at you.  One was never quite certain if the screams coming from the plastic enclosure were because of the cold water, or the addition of an unwelcome guest.

Things got worse when the power went out and we were left with a limited water supply.  If the power outage was going to last for a long time, we couldn’t afford to waste much of our water on bathing.  A problem in a tropical climate.

We had a choice of either bathing in the river in bathing suits—where our bath water might hide such critters as piranhas or crocodiles.  Or if we got a hard rain we would wash in the overflow from the gutters which was far more refreshing than it sounds.

So while most people may long for the complete spa experience or a fancier shower, for me it’s enough to have four solid walls, hot water, and no spiders playing amongst my shampoo bottles.