I forgot to mention one other aspect of our visit to Germany: the mall's restroom was run on an on-your-honor toss-your-money-in-the-dish system, sort of like passing the contribution basket at church. (I say this as someone who belongs to a church that doesn't pass a basket around, so forgive me if I have some of the those details wrong.) At the entrance to the restrooms was a bowl with a sign suggesting the appropriate contribution, 30 Euro cents, which is about 40 U.S. cents. As far as I could tell, everyone threw something in.
That's not unusual for Europe, I guess. The train station in Lucerne has a pay restroom, and if you don't have any money, you just wait for your bladder to explode. The one in Zug, thankfully, is free. The public restrooms in Helsinki also required money, and I think it was the same way in Paris, although we were able to use free restrooms at the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. I guess the moral of the story is that you don't want to drink too much while you're here in Europe. (And as I think I've mentioned before, don't be surprised when a member of the opposite sex comes in to clean your restroom and nobody even notices. It's a European thing.)
2 comments:
We scheduled all our bathroom breaks for the cathedrals so that I wouldn't have to pay! Italy's public bathrooms were by far the most expensive - 1.50 Euros at the train station in Rome! Thanks, but I'll just hold it!
Since Gretchen is on her way here in five days, we'll have a chance to put her endurance to the test.
By the way, I should let everyone know that Gretchen is taking three flights to get here from Minneapolis and four flights to get back. Are we really worth all that?
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