Thursday, August 14, 2014

Letters From Vacation 2: Interesting Differences in Public Toilets

The vacation is over (sniff), but the letters I planned to write will be written now, and this one is all about the differences I spotted, in the order they happened.

Public toilets.  The flushing mechanism can vary widely, and then you feel like a three-year-old figuring out that potty business:  Proud when you get it right.  And what's very nice are places which have the sinks for washing hands inside the cubicles, too.  But mostly I was impressed by the hooks.  When you travel you need strong hooks for the backpack and whatever else you have in the cabin of the plane, and the tiny, flimsy door hooks of the usual cubicles are worth zit in that context.

Imagine a largish letter U, flatten the base and then attach it to the wall from that flattened base so that the arms of the U flail out into the room, invitingly.  If the flattened base is about three inches long, the hook can either take two bags, one on each flailing arm, or support a heavy backpack over both of them.

Such trivial things make life much easier.  God is in details and Goddesses are in the micro-details.

Other travelers have told me stories about public toilets which are just holes in the floor.  That takes good knees, but I didn't come across any to test mine (which are divinely flexible, naturally).  And naturally I know nothing about the toilets for men (though in some places people used the toilets independently of gender-markings (women's icons have a dress with one leg hanging from the middle of it)) because the toilets were for just one person at a time.

All the toilets I saw were impeccably clean, by the way.

Those words make me sound like someone with a bad vacation diarrhea.  The real reason is that when we fly we see lots of toilets in various countries, right?  Toilets must stand for symbols of countries. 

Incidentally, I hate the euphemism of calling toilets bathrooms, because taking a bath in the toilet bowl would be a disgusting experience and not on anybody's bucket list.