Potty Dance

I think I was onto something as a kid.  Mom tells me that I couldn't walk into a building without wanting to visit the bathroom.  This wasn't some sort of physical response to being in new place, it had nothing to do with the act of using the facilities.  I remember why I did it without my Mom having to tell me what her (correct) guess was.  It was to explore.  It's all fine and good to sit a table for 45 minutes and eat, but what's going on towards the back of this place?  A walk to the toilets is an excellent excuse for a tour and the actual room with the stalls and sinks can be very telling, too.  Like, okay, now I know what y'all are really about.  Restaurant restrooms were quite distinct from department store restrooms, which were totally different than gas station bathrooms.  Any bathroom that required a store clerk to hand over a key was particularly intriguing (what have you got in there?!), and mall bathrooms freaked me out because they were always down that long corridor (are we going to get lost?!).

As an adult, I can still appreciate a good bathroom although for more practical reasons than those of my childhood.  Restaurants are my favorite because they keep the fun going, matching the theme of the eatery – perhaps so you can forget that a hundred strangers have peed ten feet away from your table since you sat down to eat.  My standards for airports and outlet malls are pretty high – they have charts on the wall that tell you who has been into clean in the last hour.  I try to set the bar low for gas stations, except for Wawa and Sheetz.  They don't have to be locked up and they're really decent...what is the formula for that and how can we apply it to EVERY GAS STATION IN AMERICA?  The gas station bathroom in Muddy Gap, Wyoming was stellar.  A true oasis in the desert.

My past travels to far-flung porcelain thrones are just the backdrop for my experiences here.  Restrooms are surprisingly clean and well-stocked compared to restrooms in Ecuador and Bolivia.  This is a generalization, but I can back it up with specific examples if you ever want to hear about it.  Suffice it to say, there hasn't been a restroom I've refused to use in Costa Rica.  In fact, some of the places in San José rival or supersede the facilities in, like, Vegas.  Yeah, they're that good.

Now, that is the capital.  And I don't live there anymore.  For sure since I've started living in a rural location, the game has changed a bit.  But for the most part, it's been tolerable.  I have to come up with a new framework though.  It's an internet cafe instead of a CVS or bus stations instead of Wawas.  I feel that to a certain extent I've returned to exploring bathrooms as a way of getting a grip on a place.  At the very least, it's always good to know where's the nearest location to get some business done.  Today, for instance, I went to go meet a local elected official in his office in Nicoya.  Some people in my town are convinced that this office is holding out on major project funds for our town out of spite for a resident.  While we waited for the official to arrive (the public is attended from 7:30 to 11:00 am on Tuesdays and Fridays in theory) I took a little investigatory excursion, a reconnaissance mission, if you will.  From my findings I could interpret many things.  No seats, no paper, no soap, a frame on the wall where there was once a mirror.

We're not going to get funds from this particular office.  The five year-old Lily Kathleen inside of me was like, “Nuh-uh, this is not good,” when I saw this bathroom.  Whether it's really out of spite is a question I'm not really concerned about.  The toilet didn't flush, so...this might be a bad place to look for help.