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Art Colony: toilet stories
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
› by victoria
two of the three times I had to go pee outside:
the first time was at the Chateau Briontee, located in the Britany region of France (which is the closest to England). It's an absolutely gorgeous chateau-hotel, surrounded by acres of hunting-forest and gardens...and unfortunately, it had only one bathroom in the whole hotel. For everyone. If you were out hiking in the woods, as I was (and I must've been six or seven years old), you were doomed if you had to "go" after a 40-minute walk. There was basically no hope. So one time, my two sisters and I were out exploring the grounds, and I really had to pee (I guess it was all the Orangina I had drunk or something like that), and so after much debate we decided that I should go behind a bunch of brush, while my two sisters kept a lookout. I was petrified, but I had just gotten ready to go when this hunter and his dogs come bounding across the field too quickly for my sisters to give warning...that was a bit traumatizing.
the second time was when I was on Watershed Wisdom, and we were hiking across the Kettle Moraine forest for the whole day while carrying heavy packs. After consuming much water, I finally had to succumb to the "call of nature", and since we were really -out in- nature, my hiking buddy Olga had to walk around the next hill while I had to balance precariously on the side. Another scary one, since I had to avoid poison ivy and ticks. eeep.
The best bathrooms i have ever been in were the bathrooms at Harrods department store in London, where you have to pay a pound and fifty pence merely to go in, and the bathrooms at Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome. Both had gold-plated faucets, marble floors, the works (especially Harrods, where you can spray yourself with an extensive selection of expensive perfume offered by the white-gloved attendant).
Worst bathrooms were probably in Paris. I remember this through the misty fogs of time that a lot of Parisian cafes didn't believe in "indoor plumbing" even in the early 90's--lots of turkish toilets. Euuugh.
I saw a scorpion in the bathroom at my Italian grandparent's house back in the early 90's, when they still lived on the gorgeous farm called 'La Podere.' That was quite startling.
And now, enough toilet humor.
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