22 December 2017
My German update will be coming very soon, however in the meantime I wanted to share with you an odd thing for those visiting Germany.
On our car drive from Frankfurt to Rothenburg (via Heidelberg) we stopped at a roadside services thing off the highway, primarily to allow me the opportunity to relieve myself. So I stepped into the toiletten and was greeted by a late middle-aged, balding man, wearing a white lab coat, and sitting on a stool in front of a small table. Most importantly, he was positioned strategically between the entrance to the herren (male) and damen (female) toilets, focussing a great deal on a small white saucer which had a one Euro coin sitting in the middle of it. He smiled broadly at me and said “Hallo”. So, I reached into my pocket where I thankfully found a Euro coin and placed it on the dish. Big smile. Danke schön.
After getting my money’s worth, I returned to the car where I was told that Katelyn also wanted to go to the toilet. I walked back in with Katelyn and then used my charades skills to say, “We are together, I have no more coins, I think my last payment should cover this visit too, so please let her in”. Unfortunately middle-aged, lab coat guy didn’t speak a drop of English. He then used his own, admittedly more aggressive, charades skills, pointing out that little (klein) children don’t have to pay to use the toilet, however big (gross) children do. The unmistakable intonation was also that, in his opinion, Katelyn was the latter of these two.
At that point I think he decided that it would be easier to just dismiss my ignorance, which I was happy with.
Over the next three days in Germany I found that just about everywhere charges for the use of public toilets — 0.70 Euro per visit in service stations, 0.50 Euro at McDonald’s. Funnily enough, the one place that there wasn’t an attendant collecting money, meaning a free visit, was the Hofbräuhaus (beer hall) in Munich. Now I’m no businessman, however if you were going to set up a business to charge money for people going to the toilet, a place where they serve large numbers of people beer in one litre glasses would be a pretty good spot.
Overall, I’m about as big a fan of paying to use the toilet as I was of having to give people extra money in tips in the USA. I would almost go so far as to say that charging people to go to the toilet is verging on a human rights violation. Perhaps I’m exaggerating. Regardless, anyone visiting Germany: keep at least one Euro in your pocket at all times.
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