
I'm a simple emigrant, and Germany's public toilets throw down a challenge to me
I'm a petite girl, and that has about a million advantages. For example, I'm always comfortable in transit; even in low-cost carriers I feel like royalty. And also in the old towers, bars, or apartments in Frankfurt for €2,500 a month, I can survey everything around me while hopping, while my friends bend to squeeze through doorways. But what's wrong with toilets in Germany? Apparently people here are too tall, and folks like me are simply an anomaly. I can't recall a single public restroom where I didn't have to apply my physics knowledge and first sit (not on the toilet, of course) and calculate which ballet pose I should strike this time. It's a good thing my apartment is in a new-build, so at least at home I don't have to climb Everest. Naturally I googled toilet standards in different countries and found that I'm not imagining things! The height of toilets in Germany is 40-42 cm from the floor, while in the States and the UK, for example, about 38 cm. So that's a full 4 cm difference, quite significant, considering that few people enjoy sitting in public toilets. But that's not all—the standard height for urinals in Germany is 70 cm from the floor, while in the UK it's about 61 cm; at least somewhere it's lucky to be a girl! While I was looking up standards, I found that in the past toilets with a so-called "shelf" were quite popular in Germany, and the waste would land there first. Then you could study it or take a sample for analysis and only then flush. I have only one question: how often does the average German resident study or take their excrement to a laboratory so that full standards would emerge? And while we're on this topic, another quirk of Germany is the placement of toilets in cafés. Usually the route to them is about as long as the route our parents had to take to get to school. You’ll have to go down 15 flights, walk three kilometers, figure out which of ten doors actually leads to the right toilet, then realize that you basically don’t feel like it anymore and start seeking the way back. P.S.: Translation of the image is in the comments #curiosities