Who knew that simply taking a pee while in Europe, could be such an adventure in and of itself.
The first thing to realize is that you may need to pay to pee. Many public toilets and even some bathrooms in restaurants, are not always free, and they don’t offer family rates. Others, we found, the toilets were free, but you pay for toilet paper (gotcha again). At one tourist attraction, there was
a woman sitting in a little window rolling little packets of toilet paper. She asked if you wanted to purchase a smaller or larger roll. So right than and there, you have to commit to what kind of business you’ll be doing. Oh the pressure.
That’s not the only time you may have to decide on whether you’re doing number one or number two. In a different tourist attraction, the men’s bathroom line was divided into two numbers, one (urinals) and two (stalls).
The girls liked the tp varierty. The toilet paper came in different colors, pink, peach, light blue, with patterns. They were quite fascinated by this and started a collection (of the clean kind).
The most interesting thing the girls found, were the type of toilets they had never seen before. Here are the most memorable examples we found.
The Trough – that’s it. It ran at a downward angle through all the stalls, and out the side of the bathroom. We weren’t sure if you were supposed to put one leg on each side of it and squat or keep both feet on one side and try to hit the trough. Clearly a bathroom method that must work better for guys.
Two-foot squat and pee. This toilet is ground level, but with two concrete raised imprints of two feet in a little dug out bowl area with a little drain. Different.
Cowboy salon urinal. We saw one men’s bathroom that was three booths with little salon doors directly behind the man’s…behind. That was all the privacy he got. No girls option of any kind in that location.
Self-cleaning capsule bathrooms. We saw these in London. You pay to go in, after a certain amount of time there is a spritzing of some kind of cleaner and disinfectant. If you take too long, you get spritzed, too. The idea of a timed cleaning freaked out one of our girls that she couldn’t squeeze
out a drop.
Enjoy your bathroom adventures. Take pictures of the bizarre ones or your friends will never believe you.