We went to one of the five cafés on
Place Monfort – the square in the center of town - for lunch and, before we left, I went to the
bathroom. The trip is a common occurrence given my age and the elasticity of my
bladder. Anyway, it made me think of the differences between restrooms in the States
and in
France.
The first big difference is that in France, the
bathroom is NOT the toilet room. Most of the time, the toilet room is separate
and, if you are lucky, has a sink for hand-washing (we don’t). The French
explain that the bathroom is for bathing. The toilet room is for toileting but
NOT for toiletry which occurs in the bathroom.
So, when you are in a restaurant, you ask: “Où sont les toilettes.” Always
asking where the toilets (plural) are, but when you get directions and arrive
at the toilettes, there may be only one. But you can never ask : « Où
se trouve la toilette? » Because « la toilette »
refers to doing your morning time in the bathroom in front of a mirror (faire la toilette).
There is a big difference between toilet rooms in the states
and here. In France,
most toilets offer a two-button flush: one for light, one for full flush. The
second difference is that French restaurants don’t seem to have to comply with
‘handicapper accessible’ to the extent that American restaurants must. I
believe that most toilets in French restaurants are NOT handicapper accessible.
But then, most restaurants are not handicapper accessible - unless the
handicapper/chair user wants to sit outside – assuming that the
handicapper/chair user was able to negotiate the lack of curb cuts, narrow
sidewalks, etc. Note to self: write
something about handicapper accessibility…
Another difference is that the French are much less
puritanical than we, so, there might be a toilet room for men but the stand-up
options are visible to the women who might be walking by… (It is not very
different from the denizens of men who ‘water plants’ along the roadways.)
Whether it is a small café or a big restaurant, the “Dyson”
hand drier is the “le top” (new French word). It is so much
more efficient than the slow, old air dryers. I don’t know how it compares ecologically
with the restaurants that continue to offer hand towels…
Oh, BTW (aka ‘by the way’) I almost forgot that there are many
toilets in the restaurants that do not have a toilet seat. I don’t know whether
it is because they have decided that one more thing to clean is ‘over the top’
or because they have decided that a toilet seat makes it so comfortable that
one might choose to remain there longer than necessary. Whatever the reason,
few “toilettes” have seats…
