Job Discussion Forums

[guru]

whay Asian countries would have a reasonable amount of hygiene?

I'm in Indonesia suffering from typhoid and have suffered from dysentry in the past. I'm just wondering where a better place would be.

[Gordon]

None of the above. If I had to choose one (I've been to 4 of the places on your list), I'd say Malaysia. I was surprised how good the hospitals were, but I had just been in Thailand, so that may explain it.

[Aramas]

Viet Nam probably still has enough residual Agent Orange to keep bacteria levels reasonably low

[Ki]

I have always been okay in Malaysia and Thailand, even when I ate chicken during the bird flu virus thing earlier this year. I did get food poisoning in Hong Kong though and they wouldn't let me leave because they thought I had SARS.
Ki.

[Bunny]

Never had a problem in Singapore!

[Roger]

Although HONG KONG is part of CHINA and not a separate COUNTRY, it is different in more than one way, and one being its comparative CLEANLINESS; at least its eateries won't wash dishes in the same bucket for the whole day, its food inspection is quite feared, toilets are maintained, and stiff fines are now given to litterbugs.
The difference to the mainland is obvious, and as a resident or even only a transient you can report anybody falling foul of legal provisions.

[cheekygal]

Malaysia and Singapore. Especially Singapore.

[herman]

Hong Kong - you just need to make sure you know where you're eating. It's mostly safe, but there are those places (see baby roaches lurking around?).

For HK I have nothing to complain if not for the hot humid weather especially in the summer when bacteria thrive. Imagine my horror when moving back to the U.S. and finding people put cookies right on a desk of a classroom where millions of different people and things touch it every day. Of course no one ever gets sick. This is quasi-north in Indiana.

In overpopulated monsoon Asia, wash your hands and keep your house clean so the roaches don't come in through the pipes (or the ants marching all over to wherever those crumbs you acidentally dropped on the floor).

Different places require different hygienic habits and measures, that's all.

[PKB]

Hong Kong has it's clean restaurants, but it also has tons of hole in the wall restaurants, while they may not be serving muskrat, they sure don't look clean and they smell horrible. As I turned down every block I found new and horrible smells, I would have gotten used to it, except for the fact that the smell is always changing.

I stayed at a nice hotel, the Regal, and they provided us with pitchers of bottle water, but when we ran out, we asked at the desk if it was ok to drink the tap water, and they said, "Oh no!", and they immediately got us some more bottled water.

Hygenic? I guess. Clean? No.

[matt2p]

I am currently in Changchun in Jilin province and I can tell you hygenic it is not. Take a walk down any small sidestreet and you can see inside the kitchens of many of the mom and pop restaurants. I have watched bored cooks in their filthy clothing sticking their fingers into batter and playing with it after having those same fingers digging around in their noses.

The people seem to be very fond of spitting and the 'farmer blow'. Even when seated in a restaurant, patrons will often spit or blow their noses onto the floor. God only knows what goes on behind the closed kitchen doors in some of these places and the more I think about it, the worse it seems to be.

The drains and sewer systems seem to be quite antiquated here as well. If you want to find a washroom in any public building, just follow your nose. The stentch of urine will certainly tell you how close you are. There is a foul odour that permeates into every nook and cranny of my tiny apartment. The source of which is the sewer many floors below. The gasses are allowed to escape into my humble abode because my drains are open and I don't think the Chinese in this area are familiar with a water-trap.

I have been told that the best time to go to a public bath house is in the morning because by the afternoon the water is very dirty. Sounds like fun doesn't it?

The locals like to urinate whenever and wherever the mood strikes them.
After all, the sidewalk is much cleaner than the WC. But don't forget, these are the same sidewalks that the locals stack their cabbage on in the autumn to wither so they can store it for winter.

As we all know, you CANNOT drink the tap water and during the winter months with the burning of coal, you will have difficulty breathing the air.

Thank you and good night from Changchun.

[nasigoreng]

Singapore : without a doubt the cleanest place in Asia.

[Travel Zen]

matt2p

That was hilarious, and I don't doubt that it is true. I'm heading there in March. Maybe I can bring some hand sanitizers for you

[Mr Wind-up Bird]

Depends what you're looking for. Singapore is spotlessly clean; it's also soulless and characterless. Vietnam is probably the least hygienic country I've ever been to - I got more sick than I've ever been in my life within a month of arriving and ended up in hospital - but your body soon builds up a resistance to bugs & nasties.

Basically, if I gave a sh*t about hygiene I'd have stayed in England...

[Guest]

I have been to Korea, Japan and Taiwan and am now in Bangalore, India. You want to see dirty, go to any rural town in this country. I just got back from a place called Hubli in northwestern Karnataka state, and the first thing I did was throw my sneakers and sandals into the washing machine. I walked down a street that had naked children playing in cow dung, the cows of course were roaming free, open fires were burning in alleys, old men and even younger women were urinating right out in the open, and the mosquitoes were horrible. It never gets cold enough here to kill them, and they proliferate. It rarely rains in Hubli, so there is dust everywhere kicked up by the rickshaws, motorbikes, buses, etc. and I have had pinkeye twice in the past two months even though I wash my hands constantly. I never eat out anywhere except Pizza Hut and KFC unless I am with an Indian who speaks Kannada, the local language, because they can clue me in on what is really going on behind the scenes. Filthy!

[homersimpson]