The flophouse was little more than a filthy warehouse with broken doors that opened periodically to empty brimming bedpans onto the street. I picked my way through creeping yellow streams and dropped my pack in an unkempt room with a dirt floor and several porthole-sized ruptures in the walls.

The outdoor toilet was grimmer still. Two narrow planks spanned an open pit with a wall built to belly-button height around it. The pit itself seethed with a living carpet of maggots speedily digesting the remains of the last occupant's efforts. I watched in fascination as a piece of inedible toilet paper drifted off to one side over the backs of the rippling larvae.

I could hear my neighbors spitting, shouting, coughing, and urinating against the wall beside my bed. The marketplace, I suddenly decided, seemed a much more palatable place to spend the remainder of the day.

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