Ryan, in typical Ryan fashion, sent me a rather interesting blog post idea. He forwarded me a link to this image:
He went on to say: “Likely, as a woman, this sight is quite unfamiliar to you. Using round numbers, NA guys see this 2-3 mins. day. I’ve been an adult 20 years so I’ve been awkwardly staring at the fact that 1 gallon = 3.8 liters for easily 200-300 hours. In fact, a member of the first cohort of the Canadian ‘metrification’, gallons to litres remains the *only* imperial to metric measure I have clearly memorized.”
You seriously crack me up Ryan!
His other point is that apparently American Standard monopolizes NA urinals, while there are a wide variety on offer in Europe. I, obviously, wouldn’t know. What I do know is that when I first toured our new apartment, I was shocked to see this in the main floor guest bathroom:
I’m not exactly sure why, but urinals make me think of hockey arenas and beer-swilling drunk men. (Must be some scarring experience in childhood I’ve repressed.) They totally gross me out. Markus tries to tell me that they are actually more hygenic than normal toilets. Whatever…if he wants to use it, he can clean it, that’s all I’m saying.
What I do find absolutely confounding, though, is that the regular toilets here have flat bottoms instead of having a bowl-shape like in NA. I’m not going to go into too much detail, but just think about the implications of that for a second. Let’s just say that the toilet brush gets a lot more use here than in NA.
An even more oddly, our newly renovated apartment has three toilets, two of which have a flat bottom and one which is a regular bowl shape. They all look new as far as I can tell. Why would the owners mix it up like that? You would think someone would have a preference for one type or the other and stick with it.
Oh, I could go on…but I can hear the Internet pleas to stop already. I’ll sum up then by saying that this illustrates one of the many, many differences that I never imagined having to deal with. Sometimes the world isn’t as “global” as we would like to think.
I need Ryan to start sending me blog post ideas as well. Nicely done.
and you didn’t even go into the differences between the paper either. and then there are the bidets too. i think that’s an entire anthropology paper… ‘cultural diversity in toileting practices’
Actually, Ryan’s original suggestion was for “Toilets and Toilet Paper”. He is a self-proclaimed toilet paper connoisseur, but I’m not so picky so didn’t have a whole lot to say about that.
And that was what I kept thinking about our apartment….a urinal but no bidet?? Who are these people?
Hillary, I’m with you. Everything about urinals grosses me out. Especially urinal cakes. *gag*
But I LOVE bidets. So civilized!