<p>So I'm living in a college house that has communal showers. My whole life I've shared a bathroom with my sister, so the idea of communal showers is fairly new to me so I just wanted to know,</p>
<p>1) Student/bathroom ratio?
2) Is overcrowding ever a problem? As in, is it a fight to get to an available shower/toilet, or are there usually enough amenities for everyone?
3) How often are they cleaned? Are they cleaned well?
4) Call me paranoid/hypochondriac/ignorant or whatever, but do people ever catch anything like STDs from the communal showers/bathrooms? I only ask because (and I don't know about Penn specifically in this regard) I've heard of universities having floors/halls experiencing outbreaks/epidemics of certain diseases, especially STDs.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>the ratio is less than ideal. My freshman year in Fisher Hassenfeld, my hall had 30 people. We had one male bathroom and one female bathroom, each with one stall and one shower. This bathroom was frequently occupied, especially due to a high proportion of my hallmates being athletes who went to practice all the time (two soccer, two football, two track). But the nice thing is that all the college houses are super connected, so if my shower was occupied, I would try Speakman, then Butcher, then Warwick (this was rare that I had to go this far). It never happened that I wanted to shower and I couldn’t get into one; I just kept wandering until I found an available one.</p></li>
<li><p>Cleaning is variable…during spring fling people throw up faster than they can clean them, but other than that it usually isn’t an issue. The shower curtains are not big, so the floors tend to soak. Like literally, sometimes the water was deep enough to swim in.</p></li>
<li><p>Disease was not an issue as far as I was aware. Wear flip flops in the shower and you should be fine.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Yeah the only thing I would suggest is to wear plastic/rubber sandals in the shower so that you don’t get a skin infection on your foot. Also make sure to have a plastic container to put your toiletries in.</p>
<p>i only knew of one person to get sick in the quad bathrooms, and it was a skin infection on the foot, i.e. from contact between dirty floor and their bare feet. i went to the shower in bare feet all year and was fine, but if you’re going to take one precaution that’s probably the most obvious.</p>
<p>I also lived in Fisher but it wasn’t anything like what the previous poster said. I think we had maybe 8 dudes to a bathroom and there are bathrooms all down the hallway and the floors above/below you. The bathrooms get cleaned pretty regularly but for some reason a light was burnt out in this one bathroom from November til the end of the year. Not a big deal but then another one burnt out in like March so it was always dark in there…</p>
<p>As for the flip flops probably a good idea. The ones I brought didn’t fit so I just didn’t wear them. I frequently walked around my hall, the bathroom, hell even the whole quad barefoot and never caught anything but I wouldn’t advise it.</p>
<p>Oh and yeah don’t let people into the bathroom during spring fling. Had some kind gentlemen from a certain fraternity use ours and just outright **** all over the floor while I was brushing my teeth then someone vomited in the shower.</p>