A rant about toilets in Europe

I am reaching the stage where, while I am not homesick for New Zealand, I am sick of somethings in Europe. Toilets are one of them.

train station toilet in Germany. Note it costs $2NZD

Public toilets are almost a foreign concept in Europe, or atleast the countries I've been in. Some cities have a limited amout, like Berlin, but not many, and others seem to have none. I spent three weeks in Madrid without seeing a single public toilet. And all public toilets are not free. In small hick towns they cost at least 60c NZD, in big cities they cost between $2-4 NZD. Even in some MacDonalds you have to pay a dollar to use the toilet. Coming from NZ, with our abundance of free public toilets, I hate the fact that by now I've paid at least a couple of hundred bucks just to use the loo, and I have to admit to now seeing the Burger King logo as being synonomous with the public toilet sign. Anything to save a few bucks. And men, please don't use the 'its good to be a guy' arguement, any reservations I had about peeing in alleyways are also now long gone.

I love the detail in this drawing of how to flush in Belgium

Toilets are also nowhere near clean here. Back in NZ, Hauke's refusal to use public toilets was running joke between Hauke and I, with him claiming that in Germany only scummy people use public toilets. I was positive that this wasn't true, so imagine my surprize when we waited outside a public toilet for our tour of Berlin's toilets to begin only to see a young guy walk up to it, pay his $2, stick his nose in, and then run the other direction. Thats pretty indicative of toilets here.

The free ones, like in bars and cafes and stuff, never have seats. Never. It has become like a mission of mine, to find out where all of the seats go to (like is some gang hoarding them and selling them on the black market or what?!), and finally tonight I got a possible answer. A girl from Germany reckons its because the bars all started clamping down on people doing drugs in the toilets, and got rid of all of the flat surfaces that people could use to snort lines off, so then they just used the seats, hence the seats now being gone too. Crazy. I miss toilet seats.

Public toilet in Germany that the guy ran away from

Last point on toilets in Europe. They are obviously a bit more liberal here because heaps of the toilet cleaners are  men, and they just chill out in the womens toilets, talking to the women waiting in the line and cleaning each toilet in between women going in and out of it. I did find that kinda wierd at first, like not really a huge worry for me, just different. In Germany in a club they even had two special toilets with only a half-wall between them so that two friends can keep talking to each other, and a pretty cool toilet-themed bar. Strange

Its funny how its the little things that get to you, I would never have paid to much attention to toilets in NZ, but three months have given me an appreciation for their importance and also a real interest in the differences between countries!