Dark & Scary: Bathrooms

Restaurateurs, wherever you are, learn this lesson. No matter how dreamy, retro, romantic, funky or sporty your restaurant, pub or lounge, one thing you do not want ever, and I mean ever, is a dark and scary bathroom. Maybe guys like pissing in the dark, though I doubt it because their aim is never that good, but women really don't.

When I was a teenager, in high school, the janitors went on strike. I didn't have the opportunity to see what state the boys' bathroom ended up in but reports were the girls' was the worst. And it was more disgusting than a pigsty, which really is just pigs wallowing in mud (and maybe some other organic matter). The girls stopped short of wiping their butts and throwing it on the floor but used tampons and sanitary napkins were spread far and wide.

It was truly appalling. It our me-me-me culture, women are as bad as men. There are those women who don' t like to sit on a toilet seat because of germs or because someone sprinkled on the seat, so they squat above. Some also come from cultures where squat toilets are the norm. However, some of these squatters spray everywhere because there is a larger space in which their non-aim can go. Unlike guys, we don't have a hose to direct.

I think half of these people leave the bathroom stall, having flushed, but not wiping the seat, because they didn't touch it, or they don't care and are ignorant of other people's use. Sometimes it is the toilet's fault where the water splashes up when the toilet is flushed. In either case, I tend to check and wipe the seat before I leave. After all, I try to leave the toilet how I would like to have it found.

When I enter any sort of public/restaurant bathroom, I always check for toilet paper and then put some down on the seat. The few times I haven't checked, thinking I'm safe I've had the misfortune of sitting in a wet spot and there is nothing more disgusting than sitting in another person's urine. Ick!

So bright lights for the toilets are tantamount. Romantic mood lighting doesn't help there, nor when a woman is trying to fix her make-up. Glaringly bright fluorescents that give people green-tinged skin and makes them look like zombies is not optimal but I would take it over the dark and scary toilet.

One of the worst in Vancouver, was Waazubee's on Commercial. It's cramped with dark blue walls, doors that rarely close right and just too dark. Time for a reno, Bennie. (I was in there last week and they've changed it to track lighting...yay!)

Of course the scariest toilets were when I was in Asia. Singapore had modern, flush toilets, but they were squat toilets. There was a hole in the floor (porcelain, mind you) with metal footprints on either side showing you where to put your feet, as well as which direction to face (it wasn't always easy to tell). Being a big of a benevolent tyranny, they also had very large signs posted about the fines people would receive for not flushing. It was something like $50-100.

That was the luxury in the predominantly Asian squat toilet. Some were a horrific combo, such as the porcelain bowl, absolutely filthy and stained, but with no seat. You had to squat halfway and that was harder than squatting to the floor. And try it with dysentery, not sure if you're going to puke or have diarrhea or both. Yeah, that was way too much fun.

Then there was the long, unlit tunnel behind some ramshackle cinder block and brick building. You ducked and duckwalked in, past a tattered sheet hung on a string, and squatted over a runnel with some water trickling through. Fetid does not describe the odor in the hot Indian sun.
The experience of using a squat toilet on the Indian trains was something else. There was a bar to hang onto as you watched the tracks beneath the hole. As well, you're swaying to and fro, which helps little with hitting that hole. Imagine trying to hold a skirt up, squatting and hanging on and then having to use toilet paper. That was a very interesting problem.

In Mexico City the toilets were usually brightly lit but few of them flushed. This wasn't long after a big earthquake and their water table is notoriously low. If you didn't bring your own toilet paper you had to pay some matronly senora for paper, by the square. But the worst was that because the toilets weren't flushing, you did your business in them but you put all paper in an open garbage can beside them. Imagine the smell in the heat of Mexican summer. Not exactly pleasant, and very very disgusting.

So, in retrospect a dark restaurant bathroom may be paradise but a lot of them could improve. The Japanese and some other European countries are big on bidets that wash and blow dry your nether regions. No paper is used and considering the number of trees we kill for toilet paper, it's not a bad solution. In India they didn't always use toilet paper either, or water. That's why it was important to always always carry your own.