What kind of person travels across Europe seeing splendid sights, eating marvelous meals, then comes home and writes about bathrooms?

Yet, why describe the sublime, when you can as easily talk about the ridiculous? 

            In Europe the first order of business is determining which room is dedicated to your gender.  Signs with words, even foreign words, give you a fighting chance of winding up in the right place. But symbols are another story.

For example, at a science museum in Paris, both symbols on adjacent restroom doors sported feminine-looking triangular bottoms.  A museum guard pointed me to the correct place where I discovered that I needn’t have worried.  The ladies’ room was as filled with men and boys as it was with women. This scene recurred all over Europe:  men in the women’s room and women in the men’s room. 

            In the US, bathrooms are relatively uniform; many of our toilets and sinks have the words “American Standard” written on them which I know is a brand but also seems like a description.  There is no “European Standard.”  That meant I spent lots of time figuring out how to flush a toilet.  Some options:  a tank overhead with a pulley, a pull-up knob in the center of a lower tank, a foot pedal located in a non-obvious place and an electronic system that punishes a wiggly person by splashily flushing at inopportune moments.

            Bathroom locks turned out to be as varied and inscrutable as flushing systems. My most scarring “locked in the bathroom” experience occurred in the Louvre.  I’d just finished viewing the Mona Lisa (very nice) and headed to the bathroom.  The stalls in that museum are a claustrophobic person’s nightmare. Smooth stone walls extend from floor to ceiling, making them impossible to climb over or crawl under.

As I approached, I could see French firemen swarming the ladies’ room.  A woman from Minnesota (I could tell by her accent) was marooned in a stall.  A bystander told me that the museum just put in a new locking system which jammed frequently.  This woman had the misfortune of getting stuck. 

  The chatty firemen did not seem all that committed to hauling out Ms. Minnesota in an expeditious fashion.  I didn’t stick around, so I don’t know the end of the story.  I can only hope those firemen are continuing to supply her with food, water and adequate reading material.

            In Italy, many of the toilet seats—in museums and churches—had been ripped off of the pedestal.  Who steals a toilet seat from a church?  How does that scoundrel sneak out with the seat?  What does one do with a stolen toilet seat?

            Toilets in the Pisa airport possessed seats, but they were spring-loaded, an invention probably created by the devil.  Those seats would stay down only if you exerted great effort.  Therefore, if you are a human who lacks ballast, say a light-bottomed adult or a small child, you are likely to be launched into the next stall.  I’m not kidding and I won’t say to whom it happened.

            But, by the end of our European travels, I overcame my ethnocentricity.  I embraced variety, flushed with confidence and nonchalantly marched into the men’s room whenever necessary.