Suspicious toilet sign

I am not sure this is how I want other people to use toilets in buildings where I also use the toilets...

One piece underwear in the toilet

Someone had left underwear in the airport toilet. With pictures from the One Piece manga on them.

Japanese toilets: lots and lots of buttons, but not one of the flushes the toilet...

When I visited my friends visiting Tokyo, they asked me about the toilets in their hotels. There were lots of buttons, and some of them they understood, some of them they did not. There are buttons for playing sounds (so no one can hear any embarrassing sounds you might make), buttons for controlling the temperature, pressure, location, etc. of water spraying you from below, buttons for adjusting the temperature of the heated seat, and more.

There is, however, no button on this control panel that actually flushes the toilet. Which is perhaps the function people are most often searching for. This is usually done by a lever cleverly hidden on the back of the toilet, or a button hidden somewhere marked with the Chinese character for "flowing". It could also be a touch sensitive panel somewhere in the room. Or there could be no button at all; some toilets sense when you leave and flush automatically.

Beautiful Japanese toilet signs

This could be the most beautiful sign for explaining which toilet is for men and which is for women that I have seen so far.

Toilet culture in Japan

Back in Japan I had a few hours at the airport in Osaka. Japanese toilets are super advanced (remote controls, 20+ functions, aware if a human is near or not, etc.), super clean, super common, and completely free. The toilet culture is thus great. But apparently, you are not allowed to step on top of the toilet.

Cute toilet paper

Swedish design is considered great in Japan, and sometimes it is. Like for instance this toilet paper with drawings by kids.

No toilets

In Paris, as in most of the world, apparently, there are almost no toilets. There are toilets in your hotel, and in restaurants (though they would not allow you to use those unless you are actually a guest of the hotel or the restaurant) and some toilets at the stations. There were also toilets at the university where the conference was held, though they were few, old, and dirty.

In Japan, there are free toilets that are super clean, and these toilets are everywhere. There are toilets in every station (clean toilets!) and in every convenience store, every department store, etc. It is considered completely OK to go into a convenience store, use the toilet, and leave without buying anything. They will even say "Thank you for your visit" (in a non-ironic tone), haha. After you get used to this, travelling outside Japan always makes you feel that the country you are visiting is still 200 years behind when it comes to convenient service.

Very low sinks

This toilet has sinks that are not even knee high for me. Japanese people are short, but not this short, surely?

Very little privacy in the bathroom

This toilet seemed funny to me, since the urinal and the toilet are too close so you can probably not have people using both at the same time.

Farewell party in a nice restaurant with slightly weird toilet decorations

My Greek colleague is moving back to Greece, which is sad since now the two people who were most into being ironic around me have both left Japan. We had a farewell party at an American bar that serves nice hamburgers.

Toilet decorations in the unisex bathroom

We were there a few weeks ago too, and then I was fascinated by the "your leg will get third degree burns if you sit down on the toilet" way of placing the heating equipment. This time it was the same, but they had also added pictures of naked women to the wall. At least in the shared toilet for both men and women (I did not check the women only toilet). There are thus several reasons not to stay long in the bathroom (it physically hurts, and people think you are a pervert doing whatnot in there), which perhaps is the whole idea. There were never long queues to the toilet.

A drink with the same name as me, so I felt obliged to order one. Not bad, but not great.

Funny toilet in Osaka

This toilet in a restaurant in Osaka had a big fan on top of it. The fan was also bent forward quite sharply so anyone sitting on the toilet would probably be hit in the head by the fan. Unless they were really really short.

Yet another strange toilet design

There are many strange toilets in Japan. They can have remote controls, tens of buttons with unclear uses, an electronic voice talking to you, a sound effect system to hide any sounds you make with other sounds, and much more.

An absurdly hot heating element placed right were your leg would be if you used the toilet.

This week, I found a toilet that in itself was not so strange, but someone had decided to put a heating element right next to it. That made it very uncomfortable to use the toilet, since it was similar to placing your leg in a frying pan... Very hot very quickly. At least it keeps the lines to the toilet short, I guess.

My interesting hotel room in Montpellier

I reached Montpellier in the evening, and it was around 30 degrees Celsius. I found my hotel fairly quickly, and my room was clean and spacious. About twice the size of my apartment in Sapporo. It had air conditioning and wireless Internet that worked without problems. It was also very cheap.

There was a "Sex Shop" on one of the streets outside my window.

The location was great. Very close to the station (though I did not go to the station even once), close to three different tram stations (useful when going to conference venue), and 1 minute walking distance from the old city center, where all the interesting things in Montpellier are found. So there were lots of good restaurants nearby, and many beautiful things to see.

My ridiculously cramped toilet. Shouldn't they have put it in facing the camera instead?

Perhaps there is something important on the other side of the wall that makes the toilet unusable, I though. It turns out to be nothing but empty space, seemingly made just to make the toilet cramped... French architecture.

The drawbacks included being close to the station (noisy trains breaking noisily early in the morning when passing close by), being close to the city center (people partying until three A.M. every night on the street outside my window), having a window that could not be closed (not a problem except for the noise, but combined with point 1) and 2) on the list of bad things, not great), and a toilet that was so close to a wall even a Japanese (who are generally tiny) girl could not have gotten her legs between the toilet and the wall...

The window to the very lively city center could not be closed. Another somewhat questionable design decision.

I managed to explain to the staff in the local pharmacy that I wanted ear plugs, which solved my noise problem.

Kórnik: Great food

I had a traditional soup based on sour rye, ham, and mushrooms. Very good.

We went to a restaurant in Kórnik that our guide's sister (who lived in Kórnik for quite some time) said was the best. It was very nice, had great food, and even had "normal" toilet paper, haha!

The restaurant interior was very nice.

I also had the recommended local specialty: a duck filled with apples. The white things are steamed bread.

A toilet in Poland with toilet paper that you can find in Sweden too!

Kórnik: Very low toilets

There was a toilet that cost you 2 Polish zloty to use outside the castle museum in Kórnik. It was one of the lowest toilets I have ever seen. It also had the cardboard/sandpaper toilet paper.

Poznan: Pizzas and toilet paper

My colleague is not happy with pizzas in Japan. Pizzas are usually very expensive and when they are not, they are not very good. Some of the expensive ones are not very good either. So whenever he goes to Europe he as a rule has pizza at least once. Since we are going back to Japan tomorrow, today was pizza day.

We asked around at the meeting for a good pizza place and the local people told us that "da Luigi" is a good pizza restaurant close to where we are staying. We went there but it was full. My colleague went inside to ask when they expected to have seats for us, but they said they were fully booked for the entire evening...

We found another pizza place around the corner which seemed nice, so we went there instead. I ordered a pizza with salami and some banana juice (the weirdest drink I could see on the menu). The banana juice was not very good, but the pizza was very nice.

Also, the toilet of this restaurant had toilet paper that was quite similar to normal toilet paper (though still not quite as soft as Japanese toilet paper)!

Poznan: Polish toilet paper

Here in Poland, every toilet I have seen so far has toilet paper that seems to be made by combining cardboard with sand paper. At least it seems very ecological, since the coloring makes it quite clear that the paper is recycled paper.