Paris Journal: Public Toilets

One of the quotidian marvels of Paris is its system of public toilets. These hygenic enclosures line the city streets, as efficient, uniform, and convenient as everyone had hoped the Euro would be.

So you can imagine my surprise, on arriving at the Bois de Boulogne, the Paris equivalent of Central Park, to find ourselves in a bathroom crisis. Maybe toilets really are like the Euro, after all.

The park is large, acre upon acre, and the map showed only one toilet, far from where we were, for what must have been thousands of parkgoers that day. We asked the woman serving frites at a kiosk. “None,” she said. We asked the man renting ponies the size of golden retrievers. “Aucune,” he repeated. Another vendor suggested we leave the park altogether. “Maybe we could find a nice tree to hide behind,” I said. My husband shook his head. “Remember Prospect Park,” my daughter said. I won’t tell you what happened in that leafy Brooklyn enclave, except to say that the memory clarified the need to find a real toilet, san aucune doute.

In New York City, I’d always played the kid card: “My child has to go to the bathroom,” I’d say at a bar or laundromat (even if I was the one). But this tactic didn’t work in the Bois de Boulogne. The French had a secret place to perform their private acts, surely, but no one would tell us where it was.

Finally, my husband came up with a brilliant plan.

 

We would rent a boat and row to the only bathroom. Afterwards, my daughter was sufficiently relieved to even do some rowing herself.

 

Look how strong she is. Hey, maybe there’s still hope for the Euro, too.