Old World Charms
Things They Didn’t Tell You About Europe
Of course everyone knows life in North America and Europe is different: we have baseball, they have style; we have SUVs and soccer moms, they have men driving scooters and kissing each other without having their masculinity questioned. But these are but trivialities. Mere details. Nobody tells you what’s really different, what really divides two continents. (Besides a big ocean, I mean.)
Take toilets. In North America, we rarely consider our toilets. They have a bowl, a seat that flips-up, a tank, and a uniform handle on the upper-left corner of the tank that initiates flushing. Sometimes, when you encounter strange people — the sort of people that keep their couch wrapped in plastic — their seat is covered in pastel-blue carpet fabric. Or it’s one of those cushy seats that makes that horribly embarrassing hiss sound when you plop your rump down. But by and large, there is a standard toilet installed in every house and every restaurant. After initial potty-training, most people can find their way around an American toilet.
In Europe, conversely, toilets are considered part of local culture. They are works of art. The unique designs of a master toilet maker who lives in Bremen or Siena and learned his craft from his father, who learned it from his father and so on. Each toilet expresses its crafter’s vision: was he a man who pulled strings? Or who flipped handles? Or who pressed levers, pushed buttons, turned knobs or stomped pedals? European toilets are just the symbol of the sort of cottage-industry production that has survived east of the Atlantic, but which in North America has been replaced by cold, heartless, industrial mass production.
“Americain toilettes, zey ahr so boreeng, so wissout culture!” said Sylvain Pétoncle, a top restaurateur whose toilet the author used (after some confusion) in Lyon. “I do not undehrstand [h]ow one can relieve oneself een comfort amid such malaise artistique.” Everywhere in Europe, the attitude is the same. If you do not take three or four minutes to first consider the nature and essence of the toilet you intend to use (a wise decision, in any case, if you wish to know how to subsequently flush), then for heaven’s sake do not let its owner find out, lest you risk insulting him and his family.
Sadly, when Americans inform their European cousins, as happens all too frequently, that they do not understand how to flush these toilets, or that the water which splashes up out of the ill-sized bowl onto one’s pants is perhaps less than desirable, these comments are received with anger and disbelief.
Dr. Nigel Hatfield, the head of the Institute for Amero-European Cultural Relations at the University of Bristol, suggests in his new book, America Learns to Bathe, that American unfamiliarity with European relief customs helps fuel the American stereotypes that so pervade Europe. “When John Q. Public from New York criticizes a toilet in Brussels, it augments the ever-widening gap between America and Europe. America has to realize that their education system is failing them — that they are fostering a culture of uninformed isolationists, whose ignorance of the world’s other peoples only reflects their selfish, badly-dressed nature.”
Previously: Transatlantica
Subsequently: Quello è amore
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