Toilet humour....and so soon. I’ve hardly blogged a year and already I’m going to talk about toilets. This is because, surprisingly, many of my travels have been punctuated with amusing ablution stories. But I’m also prepared to argue that there’s a unique cultural element to the body waste management systems of each nation that’s just as worth noting as, say, eating customs (bad choice of comparisons?). Travellers can be sooky babies when it comes to the simplest cultural differences. It’s surprising how confronting a squat toilet is to a Westerner who just wants to perform their daily task in peace and quiet. Equally as confronting, I would say, to any Asian who wanted to visit the toilets at my workplace in Australia – there are little pictograms on the inside of every cubicle in the requisite green and red circles, indicating how to and how not to use the toilet. Apparently, it’s an occupational health and safety concern if you try to squat over a regular toilet.... so very Western.
Most of my confronting or culturally baffling bathroom episodes have occurred in Italy.
I travelled to my mother’s town with my parents one year to stay with family I’d never met. It had been a long and tiresome journey – I was emotionally, physically, mentally distraught. Relatives had greeted us at the airport and though it was wonderful, these people were complete strangers to me just then. We drove for more than two hours and finally arrived at my aunt’s house. Great. Bathroom. Needed some repair work. Trouble is, when I tried to leave the bathroom, I couldn’t open the door. It had an old fashioned key to lock it. I turned it once each way and tried the handle. Nope. I turned the key again and discovered it just kept turning. In my delicate, semi-hysterical state I started to panic. The window was too small to crawl out of and was, besides, two stories up. I knocked on the door and shouted to my aunt. ‘What are you doing in there?’, she asked politely. ‘I can’t open the door’. Silence. ‘You just turn the key sweetie’. ‘Yep, I’ve tried that’. Silence. Then I heard my mother say, ‘She’s very jetlagged and tired. Otherwise, she’s quite an intelligent girl....’. I turned the key furiously and suddenly I was free and the door swung open. Dubious faces smiled kindly at me.
I was told that, for some reason, this little bathroom in a tiny apartment in a small town had a lock that had three degrees of strength, depending on how many times you turned the key. Consequently, to unlock it you potentially needed to turn the key three times. I could not fathom the meaning of this. Was it one key turn if you were just brushing your teeth but three key turns if you planned to gad about naked for a while and really needed some privacy?
On another trip, my cousin and I wandered into a very upmarket shopping gallery and decided this was as good a place as any to use the public facilities. We wandered down a side corridor and found a line-up of four or five people (not, I might add, an unusual occurrence anywhere in the world it seems). We waited patiently but the women just ahead of us looked distressed. She turned to the cleaner and said, ‘Please, can’t I just use the disabled toilet – I’m desperate’. I use the word ‘cleaner’ but this woman had the bearing and authority of a prison warden. This was her toilet block, her domain and she was clearly very proud of its immaculate appearance and fresh aroma. The cleaner looked the other woman up and down and ushered her in without a word. A few minutes later, the clearly grateful and relieved woman came out and politely thanked the cleaner, who nodded in reply.
Then the cleaner started to frown. She sniffed sharply and narrowed her eyes. She opened the door to the disabled cubicle again and poked her head in. ‘Oh my God!’ she shouted alarmed and dismayed. She turned back to the woman who was now fixing her hair in the mirror. The cleaner rounded on her accusingly. ‘What creature did you give birth to in there? That is utterly disgusting. I just cleaned that toilet and you had to go in and do that! That’s disgusting!’. On and on she went. The cleaner was clearly furious and outraged. Admirably, in what I myself would have deemed a mortifying moment, the other woman kept her composure. I can’t remember the exact words she replied with but I remember they were haughty and tossed over her shoulder as she walked out; something along the lines of ‘It’s a toilet. So clean it.’.
Definitely something I could only have experienced in exactly that way in Italy.
If you reflect a moment, I’m sure you’ll remember some interesting bathroom episode on your travels. Like me, have you ever had to shove tissues up your nose just to be able to walk into a public toilet without gagging? Did an aunt wander into the bathroom while you were brushing your teeth and plonk herself down on the toilet with a satisfied sigh? And most bizarrely, have you ever walked into a toilet block and found yourself face-to-face with a life-sized Madonna smiling benignly at you?
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