"When you gotta go, you gotta go"

I experienced this saying for the first time on Sunday when I was on a bus that was going to Beijing from visiting my mom's friend. We were originally going to take the train back to Beijing, but we found out that the tickets were sold out, so the options we had were to stand on the train for the two hours that it took to get to Beijing, or  to take a bus to Beijing that took three hours. I opted for the three hour bus ride because I had only gotten less than 4 hours of sleep the night before. Little did I know that I would pay for that decision later.

Before departing from my mother's friends house, our host was so hospitable that he kept refilling our tea cups with more tea, regardless of the fact that we told him that we should not drink more because we had to take the bus soon and could not use the bathroom once we were on the bus. So, after many cups of tea, I used the restroom and we left for the bus. After much confusion of where the bus would be departing from, we finally decided to take a later bus so we could use the restroom one more time. While waiting for the bus to depart, we were informed that it would actually take four hours instead of three hours to get to Beijing. I was a little worried about the restroom issue, but hoped that I would be okay until we got to my sister's house in Beijing. For the first hour of our bus adventure we sat in the same spot because of traffic and lane closures. This prolonged our bus-taking-time to five hours instead of four. I was now getting a little worried because five hours is a REALLY long time when you have to use the bathroom. As time wore on, I started to panic about my options for using the restroom, which seemed impossible because we were stuck in traffic and there were no rest stops in sight. It soon became evident that if I did not figure something out fast, that I would literally pee my pants. Now this may seem funny to you (and me) now, but at the time I was pretty freaked out. Up until that day I had never really urinated in public before. Actually, I have never urinated in public before. A few times when I went camping, but that was a totally different situation. What I was thinking about doing was peeing on the bus. Do you understand? I don't think you do. My decisions were these: Don't try to figure out how to do it so no one notices or pee your pants. So really, either way I was going to do it. The difficult part was figuring how I was going to do it without the whole bus seeing it happen. I was lucky the sun had already set and it was dark. The man sitting across from me however had his overhead light on, so it was pretty bright. I turned around to see who was behind me and it was this guy in his twenties listening to music. There was really no way I could do this without anyone seeing. So, I threw inhibition out the window and dug through my purse to find a plastic bag I had saved to cover my bike seat so ice would not form on the seat in the mornings. I stuffed the scarf my mother had made for my sister into the bag because I knew if I hadn't, people would hear it. Then, I just sat there. Although it felt like an eternity, it was probably only a minute or so. I couldn't believe what I was about to do and hoped and prayed no one would look at me or say anything. After I was done, I sat there with the biggest grin on my face. I was so proud of myself. You have no idea. I am sure the people sitting around me knew what was going on. I feel like there is no way you could not. Regardless, no one said anything, thank g-d. And that my friend, is the story of when I peed on the bus. :)