Can I just say that even now on my 4th year of living in Germany, I still have a small issue with the German toilet guards.
For those of you not fortunate enough to have ever used a public toilet in this country, I should explain that most of them require a minimum of .50 euros cents (some with coin automated turn-stalls) but more often, you pay into a dish that is sitting on a small attendant's table.
This attendant makes sure that there is toilet paper in each stall and that the general state of the restroom remains clean.
There seems to be a wide spectrum of creative differences in this attendant's role. I have seen everything from very vigilant cleaners who storm into the stalls after each use wildly swiping with rags and mops to the polar opposite of bashful men timidly holding their tools while trying to discretely stock up the rolls and tiptoe out of the room. I have even seen automated rotating toilet seats that rub themselves against an extracted sponge when the bowl is flushing.
I stand by my initial reaction to this system when I came here: I am grateful as a female to have a clean restroom environment and I am more than happy to pay a small amount to ensure this.
Yet I have a problem with hostile service anywhere, most especially when it's at a personal time such as when a human being is eliminating waste. And then there's the whole privacy issue which is super-weird if you are in a gas station in the late evening and you're the only one there which basically means another person is just sitting outside the door listening to you use the bathroom.
But I recently had an even stranger experience. We were at a "fake beach" bar. The Germans literally haul in dump truck loads of sand and construct random "beaches." They are complete with bar, restaurant, music, lounge areas, play areas for the kids... basically amazing make believe places. The one we were at did not technically have "port-a-potties" but rather a trailer-looking restroom area around the outside of the bar.
A very stern woman was at her table outside the toilets. So there was the initial confusion as to whether I should pay before or after I used the toilet. Most of the time in a restaurant situation you don't pay at all, but this particular place is on the banks of the river and if there wasn't an attendant, then everyone from the public would take advantage of the bathroom as well.
My standard mode of operation is that I use the toilet first, (wash hands of course) and then pay on the way out. There have been a few times that I wondered why the hell there was an attendant when I didn't have any TP and I felt like fishing my coin out of the dish on principle. Then there have been times when I've paid on the way in but they didn't notice, and then looked completely bewildered why I left "without" supposedly paying. (By the way, if you have no loose change, you can still use a toilet gratis in Germany. I've never heard any of the attendants screaming behind non-paying customers). But nevertheless, through trial and error, I've decided that paying upon exiting is a better method.
So the other weekend when I went to flush in this trailer-style restroom (it sort of made me think that it would be the kind of bathroom setup that film makers would use on location), the plastic tab that you depress at the top of the toilet snapped completely off and fell down inside the tank! And I had to go out to the woman and tell her. And she yelled at me. (Can you be mean to paying customers?) She was so angry and said, "You only need to press it ONE time." And I said I had only pressed it one time while I slipped in my .50 and high-tailed it out of there.
But my absolute favorite toilet story is about the signage at a very nice local department store. The sign at the top can be translated as, "Please use toilet brush." This commandment is honest-to-goodness hanging on the backdoor of every stall in the woman's room. This just about had me wetting myself before I get my pants down. I mean customers are supposed to pay money and still clean the bowl?? This is a whole new level of self-service.
Just to give you some more "visuals" of the toilet culture, here is a picture of two very nice ladies outside a gas station in Austria. I thought their parasols were awesome! The woman's room was clean and tidy and the women were very friendly. I wanted to recruit them to come work over here in Germany!!