“Dying to Spend a Penny”
A friend of mine was telling me about her recent trip to South Korea. During our conversation, she produced a photo she had taken of the toilet in her hotel room in Soul. Beside the vase was an electronic panel, which invited the user to push a series of buttons depending on which type of cleaning process the hotel guest was accustomed too. Our conversation led onto a discussion about toilet facilities (or the lack of them) in other places around the globe we had visited.
The top of my list was my experiences
in China. China was just opening up to
foreign tourists when my sister and I decided to visit. The first couple of
days we travelled by boat and so the toilets emptied directly into the river
(no surprises there), however when we began to take buses overland things
changed. Every few hours the local buses
made “comfort stops”, (this never occurred in the towns or villages but always
in some rural layby). The toilets were
generally mud brick affairs with a channel that directed all waste through a
hole in the far side of the building. After a while, I began to notice that
attached to each block of toilets was a pigsty. Eventually I put two-and-two
together and at our next stop confirmed my suspicions. Everything produced on
one side of the wall, was eaten by pigs on the other!
Most of the hotels we stayed in were
in the larger cities and so our rooms were usually “en-suits” which meant that
there was no vase, but a ceramic-ringed hole in the floor. At one hotel,
however the bathroom was shared. As in
that part of China, calls of nature seemed to be a time to smoke and talk to
your neighbor, there was no need for cubicles to provide privacy. One just
squatted over a gutter while you caught up on all the gossip. To my amazement,
every twenty minutes or so, cleaning women would enter the bathroom and ask the
men to stand up for a few moments while they used high pressure hoses to send
everything through a hole in the far wall. Once finished they polity asked the
men to return to their previous positions.
Just before leaving China, we needed
to go to a travel agent to confirm our plane tickets. The agent was on the sixth
floor of a 10-storied building. As the confirmation was taking a long time, I
thought I would take the opportunity to visit the bathroom. The toilet was as I
had expected, a hole in the floor, but what surprised me was that there was no
plumbing. The hole on each floor was perfectly lined-up with those on the other
floors. Before using the toilet it was necessary to look upward and then
downward to ensure you did not hit anyone, or were hit, by someone who had
arrived first.
On our last day in the China, we
decided to splash out and stay in a posh new hotel especially designed to
accommodate foreign tourists. Our bellhop proudly showed us the western style
bathroom as soon as we entered the room. We were so happy that after three
weeks traveling we would once again have the opportunity to sit on a vase in
comfort. Only later did we discover that the Chinese engineers had made a
slight calculation error when copying a western style vase. “The water level
was only a couple of centimeters from the top.”
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/spend-a-penny.html
Spend a Penny
Meaning
To use a public lavatory.
Origin
This refers to the
(former) use of coin operated locks on public toilets. It was used mostly in
the UK and mostly by women (men's urinals were free of charge).
Such locks were
first introduced, at a public toilet outside the Royal Exchange, London, in
the 1850s. The term itself is later though. The first recorded citation of it
is in H. Lewis's Strange Story, 1945:
"'Us girls,'
she said, 'are going to spend a penny!'"
'Spend a penny' has
now gone out of use, partly because charges have changed and partly because
it was always a coy euphemism, which now seems rather dated. The writing was
on the wall for this phrase, so to speak, from 1977, when the Daily Telegraph
printed an article headed "2p to spend a penny".
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