Morning Nahptime: WC in Switzerland

The variety of the waterclosets in Switzerland amazed me. My first surprise came as a Turkish toilet in Montreux.

Yes, this is a ladies' room. Hold on to the railings and lean back.

The strategy when travelling is to always use the restroom on the train, where you've already paid. The charge in most major train stations is around 2.00 CHF (about $2.40 right now).

On double-decker trains you often have a regular flushing toilet, which they clean out later like an airplane, but on many Swiss trains, 2nd class WCs look like this. When you flush, the flap on the bottom opens up and releases the contents onto the train tracks below. I got stuck in the bathroom twice waiting to pull away from the station, because of course you are not allowed to flush while at the stations.

The bathroom inside of Germany's Vitrahaus was beautiful. Black walls, with red stalls.

Some of the stalls had their own light switch, often it was timed. This is the light switch and outlet.

I didn't notice the girls' restroom at first at Cailler's Maison. I'm just glad I recognized the words for men, as the picture has somewhat of a unisex bob for a hairstyle.

I liked the turn-of-the-century look outside of Gstaad's public WC.

The new all-wood exterior bathrooms near William Tell's historic Rütli Meadow surprised me inside by giving my first experience with a Dyson Airblade in the middle of a forest.

In a land of many languages, pictures are king.

After attending a Medieval Fest, complete with villagers performing assigned medieval tasks, I stopped in the cheese factory across the street and discovered the self-cleaning toilet. After flushing, the blue part of the tank comes forward, grips the toilet seat, and cleans it as the toilet seat circles around. The soap-filled container then unclasps the toilet seat and retracts into the back.

As a joke, Zak explained that the grand structure (below) on the hill above Vienna, Austria's gorgeous Schönbrunn Palace (above) was the royal outhouse.

Boys.

I'm not sure why, but many of the WCs have the tank high up on the wall, such as the women's common bathroom at our hotel. I liked the nice wooden building decoration at the end of the flushing chain.

At the Chateau de Chillon, we discovered that when a castle is on a lake, medieval toilets were just holes in a bench at the edge of the castle, with a straight shot down to the water. They've actually had to close some of those areas off from tours, because tourists sometimes tried to use the hole toilets. P.S. This is a bench, not a toilet-hole bench.

While the Funiculaire isn't technically a WC, it involved sewage. In Fribourg, the sewage is moved downhill, and the weight of it pulls a train car down, as well as pulling the empty train car back up the hill. Very clever of them, I say. Here's to you, "Poo-Choo."