Bathrooms Abroad

Something that I did not think that I would be writing about after my recent trip to Dublin, Athens, Germany and Italy is…bathrooms.

Here in America, or at least my experience in life this far, I have gotten used to regular ol’ bathrooms. Toilets that you flush, sinks that you can wash your hands in, toilet seats, and separate bathrooms for men and women. Now I know that there is the occasional horrible port-o-potty experience, but those are far and few between…and they usually have hand sanitizer available.

In writing this it reminded me of a bad experience I had in Mexico over 15 years ago. I was in Texas for business and a few of us drove over into Mexico to go to a club. My friend and I went into the bathroom only to discover that all the stall doors were missing and there was an armed police officer standing in front of the stall…watching. It was creepy weird, and my friend and I took turns shielding each other while we peed. Sad to say that we didn’t stay long in that club…there were worse things then missing stall doors happening there.

I didn’t have any encounters like that on my recent trip, but the bathroom situation was still different from what I’m used to.

I was so consumed with the bathrooms, especially in Athens and Italy that I actually took some pictures of them. The cover photo for this article, the one below was taken in Athens. I did not doctor that picture, or change it in any way. The lighting and everything is original! Love that picture…sad but true.

This bathroom is the girls and the boys bathroom. Each stall has a door on it, but it’s a shared space and a shared sink. The picture below shows the doors closed. Both toilets…no seats.

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All of these toilets have handles or foot pedals to flush them. Some of them don’t flush…but all of them are decorated very differently!

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This bathroom was in the B&B I stayed in when I first got to Italy. I’ve never used a bidet before…still haven’t. And the rack above the bidet had hot water going through it. If you put your bath towels on it at night then it’s nice and warm in the morning for your shower!

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There were a lot of these types of toilets…ones with no seat. Depending on how clean they were I would either sit down on it, or I would not. I did notice in one restaurant that the mens room toilet had a toilet seat, but…the womens did not. I used the men’s toilet. Shhhh…don’t tell anyone.

There was also alot of these types of bathrooms. A cool looking door that said toilet on it, and then when you got in the room you would see both the mens and the womens stalls. Or a uni-sex bathroom. I was always in there alone, so I’m not sure how it would work if there were men in there with me. That would be something I would have had to write about it!

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This was a very cool thing that I encountered…foot pedals for a sink! It was fun to figure out how to use it where the water wasn’t too hot or too cold. That sink I used a few times…just cuz it was cool!

In writing this blog post I find it so funny that I took these pictures and actually had discussions about the bathrooms after coming out of them. I talked about it so much that my boyfriend and the hosts we stayed with took pictures of bathrooms and texted them to me, and joined in the conversations with me about them.

This is probably one of the weirdest blog posts I’ve written, but for some reason this is all so interesting to me…good interesting!

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