Toilets of Belgium
Belgium is the home of surrealism, and sometimes that is suggested by its toilets.
Here is Saint Catherine's Cathedral in Brussels, just across from the statues of the vomiting goats.
I have a separate page dedicated to the toiletological statues in Brussels, click here to see it.
Hmmm. What's that under the portico on its side?
Ah. It's a row of open-air urinals.
While this Belgian cathedral encourages urinating against its side, another in Saint-Hubert in southern Belgium explicitly prohibits it.
Speaking of open-air urinals, European toilet facilities often have a common hand-washing area shared by women and men. That makes sense, why waste space on duplicate sinks?
The urinals are often in an open alcove off that area. This example at Brussels' Mappa Mundo bar shows the view from the common sink.
See my separate page dedicated to the toiletological statues in Brussels for further Belgian toilet-related imagery.
The Belgian Thalys trains are similar to the French TGV, and connect Belgium with France, the Netherlands, and Germany.
It's great service — Brussels to Paris in about 80 minutes with a 300 kph train leaving every 30 to 90 minutes.
The Thalys trains arrive and leave Paris at the Gare du Nord station.
300 kilometers per hour and a very smooth ride.
Of course, not all Belgian trains are luxurious high-speed ones.
This is a regional train in Dinant, in the northwestern Ardennes Forest.
It has the standard foot-operated flapper valve opening directly onto the track.
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box."
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. | |
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How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although I'm pretty sure they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999. My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice the one enormous toilet page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that it was split into categories, and they have grown ever since. |
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