A minor annoyance I have had since arriving in Oman is that every single toilet paper holder is on the left side of the toilet. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but every time I look for toilet paper, it’s never where I would naturally reach for it. I look to the right, but it’s always on the left. It was the same way in Egypt, but I figured it was just because lots of things were backward in Egypt.
Then I started thinking that maybe the middle east has a high percentage of left handed people and that was the reason for the unreasonably placed toilet paper. Um, no.
The answer seems so simple now, but it escaped me for 6 weeks. Yesterday the light bulb finally turned on. The general rule in an Arabic country is: you don’t eat with your left hand because your left hand is for cleaning (yourself) and your right hand is for eating.
So that begs the question: if they aren’t using toilet paper, why put it on the left side of the toilet?