Bathroom Etiquette For The New Millenium Mary

When I was a small girl, my sister in-law wrote a college paper entitled, “How To Flush a Toilet in Europe.” I thought it was so funny, mostly because she used the word, “toilet,” in the title, but also because I couldn’t imagine it to be any differently than flushing a toilet in my parent’s house. You pushed on the handle with one hand while you pulled up your panty hose with the other.

As I began to travel, I saw that she was right and that in different countries, there is different bathroom etiquette. In Bolivia, the toilet was a hole in the ground and when I was finished, I just kicked dirt in it. In India, they didn’t use toilet paper and I had to fill a bucket up with water and balance myself while I poured it down my backside. (Thankfully I had stopped wearing panty hose at this time.) And in France, the toilet is often in a different room from the bathtub or even the sink. So word to the wise, never shake anyone’s hand when they’re coming out of a bathroom in France.

Recently, here in Switzerland, I experienced something else new. I went into the bathroom of my favorite coffee shop, Bar Tabac, to reapply some lip liner that had been removed while sipping on an apple martini. I bent down to get some toilet paper to press my lips against to remove any clumps, when I noticed a dispenser for, “Seat Cleaning Foam.”

I had notice similar dispensers in gay bar bathrooms in Paris before, but those usually contained lube, not seat cleaning foam. Since I am a big advocate of the expression, “When in Rome,” I tried the stuff.

The Swiss are known for being very clean, so it shouldn’t have surprised me to find seat cleaning foam. What did surprise me, however, was that the foam was peach scented.

I hadn’t wiped the seat well enough so when I sat down, it was a little wet. At first it felt weird, but I got used to it and felt a little bit at ease knowing that the seat was clean. It didn’t burn like I thought it would but was a little sticky.

As I sat there, I imagined what it would be like if humans were like dogs and smelled each other’s backsides. I laughed a little when I thought of some stranger smelling me and then standing up and saying, “Wow! That smells great! What is that, peach?” Then I remember that as a sexually active woman, I did often have men smell my ass. I wasn’t sure if the peach scent would be a plus or not but knew that it would definitely create quite the buzz.

I only sat there for a few seconds because my sole purpose was to test the seat cleaning foam. When I felt I had enough information, I stood up and lowered my skort. I was about to head back to my apartment when I noticed that my Mary Jane’s were unbuckled and so I sat back down on the seat to fasten them.

When I arrived at the apartment, my best girlfriend in the whole wide world asked me, “What’s that on your skirt, girl?”

“First of all, Brandy, it’s a skort. It’s like skirt and short combined. That’s why it’s called skort. You know brunch is breakfast and lunch combined. Do you need other examples?”

“Whatever. What’s on your skort?”

I turned around and saw wet marks. It occurred to me that when I had sat down on the toilet seat to buckle my Mary Jane’s, that the seat was still a little wet. I felt like a teenage girl who’d been just gotten her period and wasn’t ready to share the fact that I’d finally hit the weight of puberty and became a woman.

“Oh,” I said. “I must have sat in something.”

“Did you put on some peach moisturizer or lotion?”

I took a whiff and sure enough, I smelled like the seat cleaning foam.

I didn’t know which was worse; telling her that I was trying out seat cleaning foam or that I used peach moisturizer. Everybody knows that avocado is the scent of 2006.

“Soap,” I told her. “There was some soap at the coffee shop and it must have been scented.”

So what have we learned girls? When in a bathroom in India, your ass will be wet. When in a bathroom in France, your hands will smell like shit. And when in a bathroom in Switzerland, don’t sit on the toilet to buckle your Mary Janes!