Toilet Humour

While this post is really aimed at the female half of the population, I hope our male readers will have a superior chuckle and go on to share the post with their female friends and family!

A good friend warned me that French public toilets were gross - and came with a fee and three or four squares of toilet paper.  Having no memory of my earlier experience of European toilets (28 years ago), I suspected that Italian loos wouldn’t be much better.  Thanks to something I read about a while ago – I can’t remember where – I started investigating what I was to learn are known collectively as female urinary devices – FUDs.

An FUD basically gives females a temporary ‘penis’, for peeing standing up and almost fully dressed.  It’s easier to achieve discretion with a skirt, despite marketing photos that show the back view of a woman in jeans, her buttocks still well covered. They would have to be baggy jeans.   For use in a toilet cubicle, discretion is of course not a concern, but the FUD will keep your clean buttocks well away from some foul experiences!   

There are a few different brands available, with different shapes – SheWee, Go Girl (this review of the Go Girl is entertaining), WhizBiz, pStyle, Pee-Zee ……. the SheWee is available here in retail stores. I also did a search on Trademe and found the P ez which was cheap compared to the others.  I thought I'd give it a try and if it generally worked but its design had flaws I would then have a better idea of how to choose the model that suited me.  But I have no need to change to another.

Their use does require a bit of practice, and reading personal experiences and tips online will add to the likelihood of success.  You may think it is gross, but the first place to practice is in your shower – practicing over your toilet will at best show you need no further practice, but at worse you’ll be washing the toilet and floor, laundering your clothes, and having a shower!  Having succeeded in the shower, the garden could be your next ‘target’ – it’s good to get practice in keeping you shoes dry - bare feet and a handy hose might be a good idea! 



my P ez kit

I set myself up with a little ‘kit’. In a zip-lock plastic bag I have my FUD, a small bottle of hand steriliser, a small packet of tissues, and a toilet seat cover for those times when I absolutely have to sit down!

The first time I took my FUD out for a day to Sanremo we headed to toilets at the old train station and discovered a man collecting ‘donations’, providing perfectly clean toilets and a full supply of toilet paper.  On our second trip we risked the toilets in the new train station and for free found them to be almost as clean and again supplying toilet paper. And at an indoor food market the toilets were free, clean and supplied paper, but no toilet seats!  Just as I was beginning to wonder if my suspicions of Italian toilets were unfair, we visited the mountain village of Triora.  They had one toilet for male and female.  It had no seat.  It stank.  The toilet brush was long past showing any sign that it was probably white beneath the scunge.  There was no paper.  At least there was a sink with running water, though no soap.  I was very grateful to have my FUD kit!

 

Triora at least had a toilet - it's quite touristy - but it seems there are often no public toilets available.  A few times we just used bushes - no different from home really, except that there are snakes and scorpions here, and people everywhere.  In villages we found cafes that had toilets and bought a drink or something - they were clean.

 

So, ladies, if you want to be free to pee with ease and cleanliness, almost anywhere, I suggest you get one of these - before you need one!