Apparently in Europe the idea is to make bathrooms hard to negotiate. Washing should never be easy. In my youth I remember those little geyser contraptions hanging over the bathtub that lit with a terrifying roar and then spewed out scalding water. I also remember the bathroom in a friend's flat in Umbria. It had a shower in the middle of the room, surrounded by a small lip to stop the water from flooding the whole flat. You could draw a curtain around you, but when the shower was turned on the curtain was sucked inward by the force of the water so that it clung to the body making it impossible to wash. It also allowed the rest of the room to end up liberally sprayed
And what about all those bathtubs that have a hose attached so that you can shower--but no shower curtain so that as you aim for your back you accidentally spray the ceiling and walls. How hard would it be to put up a shower rail?
This year was no exception. We rented a very modern apartment just outside Nice. The kitchen was equipped with everything--ceramic cooktop, touch lighting, Keurig coffee maker. But the bathroom? The shower started with two glass doors you had to open. You stood inside then closed the doors enough so that they came together. Then you turned on the shower. There was a choice of rain shower above--not good if you didn't want to wash your hair, a wand that was so fierce that if you turned it on it jerked out of its cradle, like deranged snake, and sprayed everything before you could catch it, Or lastly three jets, positioned up a bar... all three hitting in precisely inconvenient parts of the body.
AND... the water ran onto the bathroom floor, only held in by those two doors. So the shower experience ended with having to mop all the standing water into a drain in the far corner.
This doesn't win the prize for the weirdest bathroom I have known. That was in an old farmhouse we had borrowed in the middle of France. To reach the bathroom one had to go through the cellar (with a dirt floor), down a flight of steps into a cave. Mushrooms and ferns were growing from the walls. The shower was in a trough in the middle of the room. You climbed down into it, pulled on a cord and water descended from the ceiling, between the ferns and mushrooms . Oh, and did I mention the toilet was also down there... in a corner? A dark corner with lots of ferns and mushrooms? Needless to say we never went down at night!
Can anyone beat that?
If I become very rich I'll give the European union a grant to initiate bathroom sanity!
