Great and Terrible Toilets
I don't recall when we've ever had a thread on this.
What are people's nominations for the best and worst toilets in
Europe?
Mine, male category:
Best: the one at the bus station in Fethiye, Turkey. The couple who
run
this one make an amazing fetish of cleanliness, and solicit
testimonials
for how nice it is (dozens of which are framed on the wall inside).
They
run an equally obsessionally tidy knick-knacks stall in front of it.
I
didn't imagine it was *possible* to invest so much of one's
personality in
a toilet as these two do.
Honourable mention: the basement of Bewley's cafe in Edinburgh. All
black
glass tiles, mirrors and brass. You feel like you're making your
deposit
in a bank. It's a listed interior by the Royal Commission on
Monuments
in Scotland.
Worst: Piccadilly Circus, London. OK, it's been a few years since I
was
in it, but then it had broken seats, stunk of shit, and had
snot-coloured
spattery paint mostly scratched away by junkies' fingernails and
waist-high
peep- or dick-holes in each partition. The cubicle I was in had the
word
DIE sprayed on the back of the door (which didn't lock, of course) in
letters
a foot high using blood from a syringe.
Dishonourable mention: the coin-operated cubicles near the railway
station
in Grenoble. I've never actually got into one of these, they appear
to just
take your money and leave you locked out.
My girlfriend's list for the female category:
Best: the one in the basement of Gerbeaud's (Vorosmarty's) in
Budapest.
This is an awesomely posh cafe dating back to the heyday of the
Austro-
Hungarian Empire; the loo is all white marble and gleaming brass
fittings.
And it was free.
Worst: the Bulgarian side of the Dimitrovgrad border crossing from
Serbia.
She stuck it out and actually used it, trying not to throw up; the
Turkish
women she was with took one sniff inside, turned green and elected to
use
the bushes instead. The charge was one leva, but since there was no
way
to change money she had to pay one coin of any description, and the
smallest
she had was a deutschmark, making this the most expensive loo she'd
ever used.
Dishonourable mention: the one in the main square in Izmit, Turkey.
She had
to go through an appalling rigmarole to get the key and it was
gruesomely
filthy, but at least it was cheap.
Special Unisex Award for Surreal Squatting, from both of us: the loo
in
Cemil Ozyurt's hotel/restaurant in Barhal, in the southern Kackar
mountains
of north-east Turkey. The building is cantilevered out over the
torrential
river that roars out of the mountains through Barhal at something like
20mph (fall into this and you would be *dead*, no buts - it might be
fifty
miles before your body washed up somewhere round Artvin). The loo is
20
feet above this, and comprises a hole with a chute made of four long
planks,
the edges not quite fixed together, reaching to a few feet above the
water
surface, with a dizzying view down into the thundering foam. Our
visits
tended to be rather quick; we retreated back to our room which was at
least
over solid ground.
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