The Instagram Page Mapping Cairo’s Best (& Worst) Toilets

When Ghaidaa Hammam enters a bathroom, there’s a few things she looks for: cleanliness, a good, strong bidet, a functioning soap dispenser, the presence of tissues. She of course takes note of the smell, and, after a request from one of her followers, she pays close attention to how well the door locks. If these basics are met, she’ll consider the aesthetics of the bathroom.

“I pee everywhere I go,” Hammam, a PR & Communications Specialist with a tiny bladder, tells us. “In every neighbourhood, there are places where I know I could go pee, and places where I know for sure I won’t pee.” When Hammam started posting reviews of her toilet adventures on Instagram under her personal account, what started as a joke began gaining traction and led eventually to its own page: a guide to the best—and very much the worst—toilets in Cairo.

Named ‘To Pee Or Not To Pee’, Hammam’s page is not for the faint of heart. Hammam doesn’t just review pretty places; she rolls up her sleeves and gets deep in it, taking close-ups of the toilet’s flush, the paper rolls on the floor, the hairs left in the sink. It’s a little nauseating, but that’s the point.“I view the toilet as a completion of the restaurant experience. There are many places that serve good, expensive things, and their bathrooms are disgusting. There are places I used to go to that I’ve stopped going to because their toilets are unclean.”

If there’s a social cause attached to her work, it’s two-fold: getting restaurants to clean up their act (literally), but also helping people find better toilets when they’re out in the city. Browsing through To Pee Or Not To Pee’s highlights on Instagram, a user will find a breakdown of Cairo’s toilets by neighbourhood, including Downtown, Zamalek, Maadi, Sheikh Zayed and Tagamoa.

“You know how you go on Google Maps to check reviews of restaurants? I want people to check my account to see if a toilet is worth peeing,” Hammam says. But her aspirations for To Pee Or Not To Pee don’t end there. Half serious, half joking, she adds, “I want to be the Michelin Star of bathrooms.”While Hammam’s rating system is a little less strict than that of the Michelin guide, she has no problem calling out places on their stink. At the top of Hammam’s list of worst toilets are Foam in Zamalek, Tipsy Camel in Maadi and Koshary Abou Tarek in Downtown. However, Hammam is not an unreasonable reviewer—when she finds a good bathroom, she’s happy to give it its flowers. (For the curious: she had great things to say about Granita, Almería, Odoriko and Samak Laban.)

“At first my style of content was very amateur and I was just having fun with it,” Hammam says, “but eventually I’d like to have an input [on the city], and say that its toilets should be cleaner.” Many have rallied behind that mission, and her page.

“I’ve created some friends from my followers. I’ve had people tell me they needed something like this in their life. I feel girls especially understand the struggle. It’s something very silly maybe, but I feel like it’s a luxury to not have to use the bathroom outside.”

As her page grows, Hammam has also found that her content attracts not just women, but increasingly more men. “I’m trying to be more inclusive,” Hammam says. “Sometimes the bathrooms I go to are unisex, or if I have a friend with me I make them go take photos of the men’s toilet and give me a review.”

She’s also expanded beyond the immediate confines of the city, with posts of bathrooms in Alexandria and Dubai, where work sometimes sends her. But whether home or abroad, Hammam doesn’t go hunting down bathrooms to review. Rather, the content of her page is based on where she happens to find herself in her day to day.

“I want to print stickers soon so that I can leave them on bathroom doors after I do a review,” Hammam tells us of her future plans. Whether or not Cairo’s venues step up their game in response to this new reviewer in their midst, Hammam’s mark (i.e., stickers) will soon be left upon the city to ultimately answer the question: to pee, or not to pee?