My exes house. When I first went to his house, I was disgusted. The smell was foul, like dirty dogs and mouldy smell. The house looked like a dustbin, he had cobwebs hanging everywhere, big thick black ones. I couldn’t breathe. I was sick on the way home. I took 2 week off work to clean it for him.

I went to Trinidad once, and I have to say, in several places (not all of them, the Hilton hotel is nice) the standards are much lower for cleanliness. I think the dirtiest place I went when I was there was a bar in the middle of nowhere. It smelled terrible, there was dirt everywhere (including all over the table), there was no real floor, you basically are just standing on dirt, and I don’t think they had a bathroom, so I don’t want to know where they “did their business” 0_o

Sewage Treatment Plant. I had a contract to repair a digester and that was 3 weeks of work at an operating STP! That smell is something you just can’t get used to! Ughh! I took hour long showers after work. 2nd place would go to Honduras….that country is messed up big time!

I have been in pig farms, veal farms, a veal slaughterhouse, some poorly run dairy farms, and a few other related places. 99% of the farmers are excellent caretakers, but I have also seen what hell might look like.

A town in Alabama. just passing through and stopped for gasoline and a sandwich. the trash on the streets was unbelievable. the wind was blowing and paper was flying all over the place. empy plastic bottles and cans were everywhere. just because of this situation, i left this town and went somewhere else. i figured if the streets looked this way, that the food may also be dirty. i am not sure, but i believe this was in the southern part of Birmingham, Alabama.

Naples, Italy. trash everywhere, people actually throw things out their home and car windows. The first time I saw a wine bottle come sailing out a window and smash against a rock I couldn’t believe it. Oddly enough, the inside of the homes and cars are clean. They hold us in contempt for out cleanliness. Someone commented to me once because I held onto a gum wrapper until I could find a trash can.
I was disgusted by the fountains, they are choked with trash, frescoes are out there exposed to the elements. Houses everywhere are incomplete as are municipal projects. They run out of funds before stuff gets finished because the government is so corrupt.

My aunt had an not-quite-elderly downstairs neighbor who was beyond filthy. I hated having to go there, but my aunt was being kind to this woman, and occasionally, we went to visit. One day, when I was ~4, we were in her flat, and while helping her move things around in her room (the woman wasn’t very strong, I guess), my aunt lifted up the mattress from the box spring, and it was covered, no, inundated with cockroaches. Some of them started flying. Me, I took off from that apartment, which itself was an obstacle course of trash, dog droppings and piles of dirty laundry. Can you believe I got a spanking later for my rudeness in running away? Apparently, my open childish disgust at this woman’s place made the woman feel bad.

I have never ever forgotten that place, nor the dirty woman who constantly seemed to wear a stained paisley print muumuu, had stringy, greasy hair, no teeth and warts on her face, so I thought she was a witch. You’d think these sorts of people were figments of a demented imagination, but they aren’t! I’ve never understood how it is that people choose to live in such utter chaos and filth. Even at my most despairing and depressed, I’ve kept my abode and my person clean!

@john65pennington The southern part of Birmingham, AL and the suburbs to the south are affluent and immaculate. You were somewhere else.

Of all the hellholes I’ve seen, the worst is a tossup: Pakistan, Philippines and Panama. All are typical Third World; filth, overcrowding, pollution and no attempt to do anything about it. Landless, rural poor displaced into urban areas, living in shacks made of waste material. Clapped-out cars, trucks and buses belching smoke. Trash piled everywhere, no attempts made to clean it up. Human and animal waste lying about. These places assault all the senses; grimy, noisy, smelly and ugly.

I’ve been in quite a few filthily disgusting places. Recently, though, my hubby and I were in England and staying with a friend who lives in Reading. The stairwell and stair case that lead from the parking lot under the station to the train platform was disgusting! Smelled of urine both fresh and old and layered with a thick grime.

I have been from my earliest youth fascinated by science in general and chemistry in particular. Majored in chem. But as a kid growing up in very rural, pastoral South Norfolk VA there was a long lane back into the woods across the street from our clan’s houses. About a quarter mile down that lane, just beyond the railroad spur down the southern branch of the Elizabeth River was a dump that the Texas Oil company’s lab used to dispose of old laboratory glassware, supplies and chemicals.that were deemed no longer useful.

I spent many a day climbing over the piles of smelly refuse and broken glass, oozing tar, chemicals of every description and who knows what else. I retrieved any labware I thought I might be able to clean up and reuse. Eventually, I equipped a pretty nice chemistry lab in my dad’s shop. I had beakers, flasks, test tubes of every ilk along with test-tube racks, a Bunsen burner I jury-rigged to a propane torch for gas supply, even exotic glassware like condenser tubes. But I must have exposed myself to every carcinogen and bio-hazard know to mankind in my quest for free lab supplies. It’s a testament to the strength of my immune system that I am here today to tell about it.

A very squelchy field from my childhood. Sucked my wellies right off!

Tijuana. I swear to God, the place is uglier and scarier than what they show in movies.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land Oh yuck, that sounds absolutely awful!

Guadalajara was the dirtiest city I had ever seen. It was years ago and it may not be that way today.

@Trillian: (I’ve heard that about Naples too.) But be reassured – fresco is designed to be exposed to the elements. I’ve been to churches in northern Romania (where the weather is pretty severe) with exterior frescoes 500 years old and perfect!

The dirtiest places I’ve seen:
1. a public outhouse in Mandi, India, during a festival. Outhouses are just wooden buildings built over holes in the ground. In this case the festival had attracted a lot of users, and the hole had more than filled up.
2. Worse: Collioure, France, a holiday town on the Mediterranean – toilets in a beautiful tower that’s the trademark of this tourist town. They were choked full, so people had just squatted down and shit all over the floor.
First-world country.

@susanc That is somewhat of a relief about the elements. I’m amazed at the attitude they have, but I guess they take it for granted the way we would anything that we see everyday.

@Trillian. Yes ma’am. Go to Bali sometime to see people taking exquisite care of their surroundings, all of which are used purposefully, including the forests. Come home again and see how shabby and wasteful and messy we are here in the Home of the Free. : )

@susanc I’ll put that on my list. Right after Peru, Nepal and Scotland!

Matherton, MI.

My dad’s girlfriend’s house when I was little. There were mountains of dirty laundry taller than me in the basement.

Also, a friend’s house in middle school. There were bags of cat shit in the vents, & you couldn’t see the floor anywhere in the house.

An outhouse shack in Mexico, just holes in the ground, no paper of any kind, a bathroom in Turin, holes in the floor. I don’t know how old people do it. But it was a bar so maybe creaky old women weren’t s’posed to be there!

I have been in one or two homes which were exactly, identically like those homes on the British show “How Clean Is Your House?” I understood how those ladies Kim and Aggie may feel when they see a house which is a live laboratory for scientists who want to analyse viruses and bacteria!

The worst was a stop my Dad made while we were on vacation, driving through the mountains in Colorado in the 1950’s. The Gas Station bathroom was totally filthy. I was car sick, and nauseous anyway and it made me throw up.

My mother talked them into giving us a full tank of gas free in exchange for cleaning it up.

My ripest memory is of a burst sewer main in Victoria Avenue, Port of Spain, Trinidad – take note, @Arp – right outside Tranquillity Secondary School – out of curiosity I walked over there to see it for myself but could not approach closer than a quarter mile away. The bar you visited – a great many rural hostelries are like that. I wonder if it is as bad as the place I regularly ate in over 30 years ago: it was a restaurant in St. Vincent Street, Port of Spain, right opposite the Red House. One ate with cockroaches running over the floor. The place was always full: the food was good.

I was in this brothel in Sydney once… oh wait, you don’t mean that one.

Well, when I was in the army we had to go empty all the rubbish bins. A couple of us (including me) would be on the truck, waist-deep in used toilet paper, 3-day-old peels from the kitchen, emptied ashtrays and anything else you could imagine, and help the others hoist the barrels up the truck and empty them on our feet, then try and get on top of the heap and step on it to keep it down. Toilet paper would be flying around, the smell didn’t help much…but it was either that or parade, and I didn’t want to parade out of principle, so I volunteered. After a while I got so used to it I’d even eat while on top of that heap. The bugger is that you needed new clothes and a good scrub at the end of the day before you were even allowed anywhere near the barracks.

Back in the world of humans, my daughter’s best friend has the untidiest mother I’ve ever met. I’ve often gone over to pick him up, and seen a toilet seat in the middle of the room (with dirty water), several days’ old diapers (often opened), underwear, an overturned pot with all the soil spilled on the carpet (stayed there for weeks) and a rotten potato. The beds never had sheets or blankets, just a jumbled pile of clothes that the kids would throw on the floor to sleep, and then pile on the bed again in the morning. They’d often get sick because of the conditions.

She’s slightly better now though. They’ve managed to discover where the toilet is.

Oh the beauty of Scotland, sigh. Oh wait, that’s another thread.
Very clean in Scotland.

Years ago I went to visit a new friend. She poured her dogfood out on the fireplace hearth—no bowls. Of course, when the dogs ate it spilled over onto the floor. During that visit, she told me her husband had a girlfriend and she was so depressed. If you can’t get up to find a bowl for your big dogs, that’s what I call depression.
PS her daughter was a super sweet, ladylike Christian girl who liked Christian rock. (FWIW)

I had a good friend in 9th grade, she was pretty cool and we got close enough that she invited me to her house. I was pretty excited until I actually went into her house.
Now, she has five dogs, and those dogs SHED SO MUCH. I honestly don’t think her mother even lifts a finger to try and clean the house much, if at all, so it wasn’t vacuumed. It smelled like dog dookie. Things were thrown everywhere and disorganized. It was a WREAK.
So, we go upstairs into her room. . . It was worse than the rest of her house.
When we walked into her room there was dog poop on her floor (actually not even her floor, just on some papers/books/stuffed animals thrown on the floor) and she picked it up with some random piece of paper in her room and threw the paper with the dog poop INTO A PILE OF STUFFED ANIMALS.

This memory still baffles me. That place was nasty as sin.

It was some small city south of San Francisco back in the early 1990’s.

Oh, & my town in general.

6th and Market (all down 6th really, south of Market) ugh, and along Brannan between 4th and 5th smells like pee and has trash… it’s gross.

Naples, Italy.

I liked Naples, would go again tomorrow! we were there for the garbage mounds, streets cut off because there were filled with garbage. I still loved it.

Egypt. I thought the smell was from the camels, but it was from humans. They dress so that they can effectively spread their legs and ‘go’...or, squat. It is a smell one never forgets.

There would be places where dead animals were floating in the water, with people gathering water for cooking, with people taking baths.

Tourists bring their plastic water bottles, so that the Nile is littered beyond belief. Awful.

Taipei, Taiwan. I went there in college for a course called Communications in Asia. Taiwan is a very small highly industrialized island. Every building looked as if it had been dipped in soot. People there chewed this red berry and spat everywhere so it looked like blood splatteres wherever you walked.

The “guesthouse” I stayed in was disgusting. Roaches were everywhere. There was a plastic bucket in the bathtub that was filled with water and cigarette butts. I stayed there 10 minutes before leaving my fellow travelers. I stayed far away at a beautiful hotel called the Grand Hotel. I didn;t care what it cost. There was no way I was staying at that dump.

I wouldn’t say it was the worst place I’ve seen but it made me sad to think that Washington DC is so dirty. Coming into to the City is awful there is trash and garbage all over and very unkept. In the city itself it wasn’t bad but on the outskirts where people come in from the outside was awful. What a picture that presents for other countries of our Nation. That is why I am saying this place was the worst.

My bathroom.

My cousin’s trailor in some trailor park in Saluda SC. Place smells like dog crap and the trailor is impossible to walk into, there is so much junk everywhere… I can’t stand going there, especially on family reunions and stuff like that.