In Search Of Toilets In Europe

My favorite experience in Paris was just sitting in a sidewalk cafe or boulangerie with espresso and bread taking in the city. Another one was the free bathrooms.

 Ahead of the 2024 Olympics the city has set up new free public restrooms with water filling stations. They are automated boxes with a urinal with a flowing water wall dropping onto a recessed area in the floor on one side and toilet washroom and baby station on the other, while outside is a soap dispenser with bottle filler. When someone is finished it self cleans before allowing the next person to enter.

Europe for all its human rights bluster seems far behind the US and even the Philippines when it comes to easy to access to bathrooms and water: basic human rights. As a traveler these two things become a focus in the summer when water and bathrooms go hand in hand.  In London and Belgium we spent so much on water and often had to buy food or coffee or use a pay toilet just to pee. A kind toilet guard in London near Parliament let me in for free when I didn't have correct change. I'm sorry, but your UK taxes give you healthcare, but you have to pay to use the toilet. I wonder if there are pay toilets inside Parliament?

By the time we got to Paris, a free barthroom and water was like finding an oasis in the desert. I stood in line next to Notre Dame for the urinal portion behind two Chinese women who took turns using something that in Western construct is just for men  For someone from China where squat toliets are common, they may be thought it was some new variation on what they knew. I'm sure it worked fine.We used these same style toilets next to the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame and it was wonderful.

 While the tower and church cramed with tourists, kitch and hawkers felt like places I'd been a hundred times before and were anticlimactic in their commercialized hustle and bustle, the things I had never experienced were most interesting. What was most enjoyable about Paris was the combination of smells, sounds and sights that can be absorbed no other way but by walking around.

 For example, walking along the Seine bouquinista stalls pictured above and smelling the familiar scent of poplar along the river and the fresh bread of the boulangeries across the street was something one couldn't experience any other way That was 100 times better than seeing some old things I knew better than some streets where I live. For that experience water and toilets are essential. A free automated toilet in Europe with water filler, so common in other parts of the world, just blew my mind.