Lit­tle Guy Pee­ing (and some obscure base­ball jokes), Alexan­dria Bay, U.S.A

As a French, I have being taught that bath­room humour is a low form of humour. But I can­not hold it any longer (pun intended) – I’m Cana­dian now, and if I want to write an arti­cle about bath­rooms, well so be it.

I was first intro­duced to bath­rooms dif­fer­ent to the ones I was used to in China. They really weren’t as bad as I had been told. I didn’t mind hole-in-the-ground squat­ting toi­lets because they were actu­ally often cleaner. How­ever, the fact that a lot of Chi­nese women do not close the door while doing their busi­ness, appar­ently because they don’t want to catch germs when touch­ing the door han­dle, made things awk­ward some­times. And in Hong Kong, the stalls were some­times very low (i.e. waist level when stand­ing up), which can make things dif­fi­cult when you are taller than the aver­age Chi­nese woman. The weird­est bath­room set up I have seen was in Bei­jing, in 2008. Our tiny hotel room had a “bath­room cor­ner” (wash­basin, shower and toi­let). But the walls were made of glass – not tainted glass, not opaque plate-glass, just reg­u­lar trans­par­ent glass. Let me tell you, we would always take a shower to fog the walls before using the bathroom!

In Latin Amer­ica, bath­rooms are quite straight­for­ward but for one thing: don’t for­get to throw the toi­let paper in the garbage can pro­vided instead of flush­ing it, because the plumb­ing can’t take it. Oh, and Boli­vian men appar­ently love to pee every­where, which made some bus rides very nau­se­at­ing.

But are Cana­dian and French bath­rooms dif­fer­ent? You bet they are.

The first thing I noticed in Canada is that there are plenty of free and clean pub­lic toi­lets. In France, if you need to use the bath­rooms, you need a lot of will and change. Once you actu­ally found them, there are plenty of hoops to go through. In train sta­tions and muse­ums, bath­rooms are okay but not always free, and the “dame pipi” (lit­er­ally the “wee wee lady”, the toi­let atten­dant who col­lect the money) can be down­right bitchy. In U.S style fast-foods, to use the bath­rooms, you gen­er­ally have to enter a code printed on your food receipt. And don’t be tempted to use the bath­rooms in a café: it is strongly frown upon  if you are not a cus­tomer. Most cities also have paid futuristic-looking toi­let booths but few for­eign­ers dare to use them — too weird. Moral of the story: don’t take free toi­lets for granted.

Oh, one more – hor­ri­fy­ing – detail: most French toi­lets in restau­rants, bars etc. are uni­sex. It’s like at home: a small room with one toi­let plus some­times a uri­nal. This is mostly is big cities where space is at a pre­mium. I per­son­ally don’t see why so many North Amer­i­cans are hor­ri­fied at the per­spec­tive of pee­ing after some­one of the oppo­site sex – it’s not like you are going together. On the other side, French may con­sider North Amer­i­can bath­rooms not pri­vate enough because the stalls do not have full doors – most have a foot of empty space from the floor to the door.

Bath­room setups in France are also dif­fer­ent: a bath­room (“salle de bain”) def­i­nitely doesn’t have a toi­let in it but only a wash­basin, a bath­tub and some­times a shower. “Toi­lettes” or “W.C” (i.e the actual toi­let) are in a sep­a­rate room. In Canada, bath­rooms always have a toi­let and, to my sur­prise, a lot of houses have two or more bath­rooms. In Paris, it can be the exact oppo­site: some­times, sev­eral apart­ments share one toi­let, located on the floor, with the neigh­bors. Even in Nantes, when I was a kid the bath­rooms were out­side but we had a bath­tub in the apartment.

Now, get­ting spe­cific. I find toi­let seats in North Amer­ica extremely low com­pared to France’s — they look like kids’ toi­lets to me, and I’m not even that tall! I have no idea how big Amer­i­can foot­ball play­ers or hockey play­ers can sit on those. That said, the toi­let bowl is def­i­nitely big­ger, with way more water. On the other side, a lot of for­eign­ers com­plain they have trou­ble find­ing the flush on French toi­lets, which never seem to be at the same place. Recently, Cyn­thia reported on the French obses­sion for colour­ful and scented toi­let paper – come to think of it, toi­let paper is just plain white here. I also find North Amer­i­can toil­ers very stan­dard — they all look the same! In France, some toi­lets are “à la turque” (“turkish-style”, that’s how French call squat­ting toi­lets), some don’t have a plas­tic seat and lid, some have fancy fix­tures… using the bath­room there is always an adventure!

Sure, writ­ing about bath­rooms and toi­lets is not super glam­orous nor classy — sorry if you were hav­ing lunch read­ing this blog. But it is def­i­nitely part of the funny cul­tural dif­fer­ences you dis­cover when you travel or live in a for­eign country!

Related arti­cles:

1. 5 Sub­tle Cul­tural Differences
2. Sights of Paris (Part II)
3. My Seven Links
4. Liv­ing Out Of A Bag
5. Chat­ting Is Cultural