The Toilet Blog

By: Joy Fuhrman

Class of 2012, Colorado State University 

In 2006, my husband Greg and I were fortunate to do some international travelling.  To keep our family and friends up to date with our experiences, we set up a website to which we posted pictures and wrote blogs.  This blog, written while we were in Europe, is as much fun to read as it was to write.  Hope you enjoy!

This morning I asked Greg if it would be totally inappropriate for me to post a blog discussing the European toilets.  There, I said it!  TOILET!!!  Not bathroom or restroom or powder room.  Toilet! Aseos, toilettes, servizi or simply, WC.  For those of you who disapprove of this dirty subject, please forgive me, but my own curiosity (not to mention that of many I know) has compelled me to write this analysis of the good, the bad and the ugly that Europe has to offer.

First, the Spanish toilet: not bad, but not the best.  For the most part they were somewhat clean and all had seats (yes, this is not a given throughout Europe).  Most of them offered the double-flusher option - short flush for a number one and longer flush for a number two.  Flusher buttons were always on top of the cistern as opposed to the giant full-hand-size flushers on the wall behind the toilet found in both France and Italy.  Happily, there were none of those little pin-ball-flipper-style flushers like at home.

France had by far and away the best toilets that we came across in Europe.  In fact, these are some of the best toilets ever!  In Cannes I was introduced to the hands free toilet.  First you wave your hand over a sensor on the right-hand side of stall.  This engages a mechanism that makes the seat come down with a fresh, perfectly fitting paper covering (unlike those ones in America that take so long to put in place you have wet yourself before you are ready to sit down).  Then you sit (on your clean paper covering) and do your thing.  When you are done (and hopefully wiped), you wave your hand over the sensor on the left-hand side of the stall causing the paper seat covering to fall neatly into the bowl and to be flushed down the pipes.  Very civilized - in a French sort of way - the nouvelle chic of toilets.

Later in France I found a similar contraption but this time the seat was already down and the paper covering rotated around the seat in a sort of airport-baggage-conveyor-belt type fashion.  And instead of being flushed down the bowl, the used paper covering is deposited into a receptacle hidden neatly behind the bowl, probably requiring some poor sole to empty the receptacle regularly.  Still, I very much liked the hands free option - if only they could invent a hands-free stall door too!

Then there was Italy!  I am quite certain that Italian women have by far and away the strongest thighs of all women worldwide, this strength being developed from years of squatting over the seatless Italian toilets.  Yes, no seats! Still fathomable for a number one; but what about those have-to-have-a-magazine-with-you moments?  Also, cleanliness was seldom even on the radar and as for bogroll (aka toilet tissue) - forgedaboudit! Needless to say, being the public-toilet-phobe that I am, Italy has not been a good place for me. 

In fact, at the Pompei ruins, I shunned the port-a-potty toilets (the only ones available at the first entrance) and instead opted for an excruciatingly long and very uncomfortable walk to the main entrance where there were the usual seatless, but appropriately plumbed variety.  I am not ashamed to say that I had to clutch myself several times - this action being exponentially less embarrassing than the alternative.  Despite Greg's trying to rationalize with me (followed later by outright pleading), I refused to succumb to the lowest common denominator of the toilet world.  Had he allowed me, I might have found a quiet corner and left my mark on Pompei, but his fears of bailing me out of an Italian prison unleashed a reign of toilet terror banning me from any such exploits; and so I hobbled my way across the cobbled streets of Pompei until I experienced my own volcanic eruption on the other side.

Before I close the door on the subject of Italian toilets, I noticed that the country offers a huge potential for an entrepreneurial toilet-stall manufacturer.  All the public toilet stalls appear to be made by the same company and every one of them has a door lock so complicated that Houdini himself would have had a hard time getting out of a stall.  Of course by the time you have finally found your way out of the toilet, your fears of missing your flight/train/rest of your life while you were locked in a toilet stall are replaced by a fear of what you may have contracted while you were using every body part in a fretful attempt to escape.

Finally, on a cleaner note, I would like to mention the washing facilities.  While almost all places have replaced the old twisty faucet with new-age water saving ones, there are still some differences to note.  Italians seem to favor the foot-pedal faucet (surgeon style).  Not a bad option and certainly better than the push-the-button option which allows for just 2.5 nano-seconds of flowing water.  This invariably leads to the water shutting off mid-wash requiring you to push the button again, this time with soap all over your hands.  Of course my favorite is the hands-free motion detector that allows for minimal contact with any public bathroom surface.  As for hand drying, it was not until we reached Italy that we found paper towels!  While the air dryers always seem like a good idea, it takes a lifetime to get your hands dry.  So leaving the bathroom with wet hands is commonplace for most visitors and you cannot help but wonder how it was that their hands got wet in the first place!

An American couple we met in Zambia, Scott and Amy Covey, who were also traveling around the world told us that they ate very little in China. "It was not a food issue, but a bathroom issue", they said.  I am proud to say that I have bravely fought (and survived) the bathroom battle of Europe - but it appears that the war is not yet over!