Irish bathrooms are a trap

I'm going to say this right from the start. You should really flush all expectations you have for this post straight down the toilet.

This toilet.

Finally-at long last- the bathroom post.

I know you have a lot of intelligent questions about Ireland, like what's the culture like and stuff, but secretly there is only one thing anyone wants to know: if I go to the bathroom in a different country, what will it be like? Well the wait is over. Kate is here to give you the low down on the loo.

Irish toilets are terrifying.
First off, there is no guarantee you will ever get out. I can't tell you how many toilets I've been in where I had to contort myself into an origami paper dragon just to reach soap and then blast myself out the door with an industrial strength hand drier. Honestly, the exits here are designed for teeny people. Just one more thing the leprechauns have ruined.

Do you see this s#*%? I am completely f@&%ing stuck.
And no, I'm not that fat yet.

Not only do these bathrooms make you feel fat, they also make you feel like a child. Because all over town you'll find detailed instructions on how to wash your hands. Multi step directions, posted in big block letters, just in case you lost your train of thought in the middle and had no idea how to proceed from there. Walking into an Irish bathroom makes you feel like an obese infant. No link here. Just imagine it.

Next, I will the answer to the great mystery of the blue bathrooms, because you come here for learning. Flatmate Ciaragh has informed me that the blue lights are not, in fact, full body scanners, but a preventative measure to ensure that you cannot find your veins and shoot up heroin in the immigration office bathroom. Which makes little sense to me, because Irish people don't do drugs in the bathroom. They do them in plain sight in the middle of the pub.





This is Matt and Janetta. They would wish you a happy stay in Ireland, if they ever got out of this bathroom.







What Irish bathrooms lack in drugs, they make up for in something far more heinous: chewable toothbrushes. I wish I had a picture for you of what my face looked like while I was eating it. A chewable toothbrush is a a one Euro tissue which you get out of a bathroom dispenser and shove in your mouth. It only takes about thirty seconds of chewing to for the user to notice the the taste of injustice at having been robbed.

In the same vein, Irish bathroom establishments will take all of your money and none of your s#*%. Entrance fee is 25 cents to comb your hair, twenty bucks to take a dump.

To be fair, Ireland isn't the only country with messed up toilet law. I must make a correction to my earlier statement: European toilets are terrifying.

In Normandy, my friends tried to lock me in a robot bathroom.This is an automated cylinder bathroom which will automatically airlock after every use to santize the entire bathroom. This highly advanced crapping device does not, however, know how to detect humans, so if you find yourself too slow to get out, you may very well drown in your own piss.

This is Aidan, embracing the sweet, sweet light of day after a close encounter with a French toilet

Even Paris had creepy bathrooms. Friend Janetta went to avail herself of the facilities in a bar in the Latin quarter, only to retun to say there was no girls' bathroom. Wrong. Unisex is just the classy way of saying pit latrine. But hey! It's culture! You're not allowed to judge.

The next time you venture into a toilet, take a look around for these things: multiple security checkpoints, an attendant who locks you in McDonalds, a stuffed Indian tiger, or life size pictures of women checking out your goods. Watch out- you just might be in Ireland.

Note: If you made it to the end of this blog post without clicking on one article link, congratulations. You are so smart you get a nerdswirly in the back of a high school lavoratory.