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Published: July 18th 2005
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View of Trier Dom from the hotel window
The Dom is Germany's oldest church, built by the Romans in 236 AD or something like that. It's fascinating because within the 1,800 year old Romanesque structure, many centuries worth of distinctly German modifications have been made. If you were savvy enough about German history, you could read the different layers of modification like a geologist reads layers of rock. We weren't savvy enough, but we got the vibe, man. Anybody who tries to tell you that the French have mastered the Art of Living has not spent enough time in French bathrooms. Nothing throws this fact into sharper relief than crossing the border into Germany. Even in Trier, an 1,800-year-old wine town just over the line, the contrast is startling.
With a nod to the tired old "white people dance like this / black people dance like that" stand-up comedy formula, here's an overview of the contrasting approaches:
The bath-tub In France, the bathtubs are all about three feet long. This may be because the French are all so short. Seriously, seriously short. I stand at nearly 6'4" and Ashley's 5'10", and we TOWERED over Paris, almost like . . . er . . . you know, some sort of Parisian tower thingy. We felt like giants. Giants don't fit in pygmy bathtubs. The people in Reims were a little bigger -- farm country -- but the bathtub there was also quite puny.
To Germany. The bathtub that greeted us in Trier was probably over five feet long, quite wide and well over a foot deep, with armrests and, just down from the armrests, a wide
View of Something from the hotel window
We stayed in the Zum Christophel Hotel in Trier, which featured lots of renderings of this guy (Christophel?) with the boy on his shoulder. This is the one in the lightwell, with a pigeon on top of it. place in the rim where one could securely place a tumbler of dry reisling, were one so inclined. Ashley also swears the thing was insulated, and the hot water certainly seemed to stay hot longer than expected.
The shower head In France, shower heads with extension hoses are
de rigeur. I applaud them for this because I rather like the, er, manoeuverability of a hand-held shower head. But they have yet to grasp that a key complement to the extension hose head is something to, you know,
hang it on when you're not holding it. So you're forced to either one-hand your whole shower or drop the head and let it spray wherever it wants to, which is usually over the curtain and onto the toilet.
Also, in Reims, they weren't into washers. So the shower head kinda sprayed wherever it wanted to no matter what you did.
Every hotel I've ever stayed at in Germany, on the other hand, featured an extension hose with an an adjustable-height wall mount.
The one in Trier was a tower of gleaming stainless-steel beauty. You could hang the shower head just inches off the surface of a full
Mosel Vineyards
This is the only Mosel vineyard we saw on a 2-hour boatride on the Mosel River. It isn't even technically outside of Trier. bath, or elevate it to heights rivaling Shaq's collarbone. Oh, it was something to see. The sight of it after five days of French bathroom technology was ... it was like sticking your head in a freezer after five days camping in the desert. The shock of simple, functional technology. To think I was once a Luddite.
The Toilet I don't want to belabor the details on this aspect of the bathroom comparison. Suffice it to say that in France, we had two toilets. The first, in Paris, almost scared Ashley out of the bathroom. The second, in Reims, was powered by an electric motor, rather than gravity. You had to hold down the button for three seconds, and then it would begin to dispose of waste in a piecemeal fashion that strongly reminded me of
Hungry Hungry Hippo. With each "bite," a tiny jet of water would leap out of the plughole in the bathroom sink.
The toilet that met us in Germany was completely nondescript. It looked like a toilet should and quickly disposed of whatever you threw at it, again, like a toilet should.
The only thing about German toilets that bears
Church across the river from Trier
This is my favorite picture from the Mosel River cruise. Of course, it's one of about five and I took it before the boat left the dock. comment, aside from the "poop shelf" you run across from time to time, is that they generally recess the tank inside the bathroom wall. You can't even see it: you just hit the button and hear it refill. This is so cocky. The Germans should rightly be proud of their engineering prowess. But to be so confident in their toilets' inner workings that you can't even take the lid off the tank and reach inside to untangle something -- that's just cocky.
On the other hand, I haven't seen a German toilet fail.
If you get the sense that I'm a bit of a krautophile when it comes to design, you are correct. Don't even get me started about German windows, German beds, German freeways or German kitchen appliances. I do, however, reserve judgment on their taste in music, food, and political leadership.
The pictures accompanying this rant are from Trier, including the world's worst river cruise: "Spend two hours on the Mosel River and see nothing scenic!" I'd recommend against the company but I can't dig up their name. If you find yourself in Trier, stay away from the boat closest to the bridge.
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