Travel Tuesdays With KM

Sometimes You Have To Pay To Pee

I have traveled to three continents, excluding North America, and within those three I have been to seven countries.  What I’ve learned from my travels is that every country and city is different.  When traveling, I highly recommend doing your research.

As a traveler, I like to know the bathroom situation in different countries.  In the States, we are very lucky to have public bathrooms….yes other countries have public bathrooms but you may need to pay to use them.  Nope I’m not joking!  Some places you had to pay before even entering the bathroom.  This happened in various cities in England as well as in Paris.

In Egypt we were advised to bring packets of tissues with us because a lot of the bathrooms didn’t have toilet paper.  At the time I thought this was odd but went along with it anyways.  When we stopped to use the bathroom, there were women holding rolls of toilet paper.  I thought they were changing the rolls in the stalls so I ignored them.  Once I was in the stall I noticed there was no toilet paper so I went to another stall and another only to find that there was no toilet paper in any of the stalls.  Good thing we were told about this in advance and I had my tissue packets otherwise I would have had to pay for toilet paper!

Also an odd bathroom occurrence was not being able to flush the toilet paper in the toilet…gross I know!  It has something to do with the plumbing system not being able to handle the paper.  This happened when I was in Brazil and Greece.  They had trash cans by the toilet for you to throw the paper in.  Luckily they took the trash out on a regular basis otherwise I don’t know what I would have done.

The moral of the story?  Learn about the country’s bathroom situation before you’re left stranded in the stall.