WTF French Toilets

So. Toilets. These are sorely under-appreciated participants in our daily lives. You might ask why I suddenly appreciate toilets. Let me show you the two bathroom options in one of my classroom buildings last year:

Yeah, I'm serious. Those aren't random pictures I got off the internet.

Complete toilets are a rarity here. I have no idea why, but a large percentage of toilets have no seat. I have tried to come up with a funny potential explanation for this and have gotten as far as "French people don't use the toilet and they don't want anyone who does to be too comfortable," "everything is designed for guys by guys (who don't have to go Number 2)," and that "at some point in the early 80s it became very cool to steal toilet seats and no one ever bothered replacing them." None of those really work, so I'm open to further suggestions. I am happy to report, however, that this semester the bathroom at work contains a complete toilet!

As for the hole-in-the-ground, I don't even know what to say there. I have seen it before, in China several years ago. I was shocked then, but seeing it again in a wealthy European country blew my mind. The hole-in-the-ground is much less common than the missing toilet seat, but it exists, clearly. The bathroom in the pictures above was mixed-sex, so I suppose it's passable, but I've seen it in female-only bathrooms as well. I do not understand...

So the moral of the story is the next time you go to the bathroom, take a moment and appreciate the toilet you're using. And if you have toilet paper, go ahead and appreciate that too!