Trapped!
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. After four days here, I think I’ve figured out how to pronounce it.
Trapped!
Lee and I went to hear the ‘new guy’—Pope Leo—do the Angelus prayer and reflection last Sunday. It was a massive crowd; we could only sort of see him in the window, but it was interesting to hear him do the whole thing in Italian. As soon as he stopped speaking, we hustled out of the square to go to get pizza. As one does (and as we did once before, when Pope Francis was the new guy).
Pizzarium (one of the best pizza-by-the-slice places in Rome) also had a crowd, so the whole adventure took a long while, and because there are no seats, we scarfed down our focaccia-style slices using the top of the garbage can as a table. It wasn’t elegant, but man, it was good.
We’d had two cappuccinos while we were waiting for the pope (again, as one does), and then I drank a whole bottle of water with the pizza, so by the time we started walking back toward our hotel, I really had to pee.
Luckily, there’s a very convenient set of public toilets in Piazza Risorgimento. I abruptly left Lee waiting in the shade of the Vatican wall, and made a beeline for the row of stalls.
They were 1.50 euros, but when ya gotta go—I paid with my phone, and was hugely relieved to find that the interior of the stall was surprisingly clean. I used the toilet, washed my hands, and pushed the red button to exit.
The button flashed green for a second, but the door didn’t open. I pushed, I pulled, I pushed the red button over and over again, but it wouldn’t open. Sun was beating down on the skylight, and it was quickly getting warm in the stall. It was clean for a public toilet, but it was still a public toilet.
I texted Lee and told him I was stuck. He asked what I wanted him to do. I said he needed to come get me out, duh.
Then I told him I was in the first stall. He paid 1.50 euros to open it, and learned that I was not actually in the first stall. I was in the second stall. So he paid another 1.50 to open that one, and I burst out into the fresh air, greatly relieved and not at all bothered that we had just spent about five dollars for me to go to the bathroom.
Our youngest child (who is 28 and hopefully won’t at all mind my saying this) has a history of getting stuck in bathrooms that goes back about twenty-five years. Once a Mexican man had to hack away the window screen with a machete so he could be lowered into the bathroom of our palapa to rescue Lane. Another time, the kid got stuck in a public toilet in Denmark (just like I did on Sunday), and we had to pay again to rescue one very upset 12-year-old. Yet another time, Lane spent several hours trapped in an Airbnb bathroom—that was as an adult, and Lee and I weren’t around to swoop in for the rescue.
Apparently getting trapped in bathrooms is a family thing. I can confirm that it’s mildly panic-inducing, but not usually a crisis. All’s well that ends well, right?
However: there’ve been more than a few toilets in our travels that I could barely stand to use (and one memorable one that I walked out of without using, because there was no way I was that desperate).
Getting stuck in one of those might actually cause me psychic trauma. Great—now I have a whole new thing to worry about.
Take care,
Lisa
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