Travel funnies 2012

Travel funnies 2012

Torrey Orton

July 14, 2012 (written June 15, 2012)

 

The eyes of the beholder lose out again?

It's that time of year again. Travel time. Well, not quite for another month, but then we did have a small trial run to Magnetic Island, Queensland a week ago as a warm up for the main event in July, of which more later.

 

The Supervisory Loo

 

I realised shortly after this experience that I had had it before – 6 years ago in a restaurant in Shanghai's Xintiandi district. There I discovered that the men's urinal was mirrored in the hand basin wall out into the passageway through which men and women approached their respective loos. For all these years I've thought this was a peculiarly Chinese design. Now I think more broadly. It's a peculiarly loo designer fetish, maybe.

 

The supporting evidence is:

 

This time it was a restaurant loo in the somewhat less salubrious port of Townsville. Here the supervision was of pissers by same sex washers, sans the intrigue of multi-sex passers-by offered in Shanghai. This urinal ran down the wall alongside the doorway in, with the stalls arrayed at a 90 degree angle to it down the room and hand washing along the opposite wall. Here's the rub – the string of washing up basins were backed by a 1 meter by 3 meter mirror which gave the first hand basin an unavoidable line of sight enfilade of the action down the urinal.

 

Weird. Seen anything like it in your travels?? Or, maybe, of course, the only fetishistic designer here is my beholding of the facilities, a perspective strengthened by the multi-cultural evidence of my senses. Travel good; truth a wonder.