The Woman Room

In 1988, before having travelled outside of the United States, I interviewed with a foreign exchange student organization to handle their public relations.  Part of the job included going to Chicago area high schools and giving presentations to the students on the benefits of being an exchange student.  The company asked why they should hire me since I'd never had this kind of experience.  I said that's what made me the best candidate.

I told them I was sure that the school gymnasiums where I'd be doing my presentations would have very few students that knew they wanted to be exchange students and that would sign up without a lot of convincing.  Instead, the gyms would be filled with students just like me that liked the idea of living in another country with a new family, learning a different language and making new friends.  And probably, just like me, they'd be afraid to leave their old  friends, lose a year on the cheerleading squad and miss out on Prom and Homecoming. These students needed to hear that I'd had all of the same fears and that in the end I'd never found the courage to leave.  I wanted to keep them from making the same mistake.

It worked.  I got the job.

I remember that I started my presentation talking about foreign bathrooms.   I talked about the different ways to flush a toilet.  Sometimes you have to pull a dirty string.  Other times it's a chain....just as dirty, you just can't see the dirt.  There might be a small button on the wall to push or a lever on the floor to press with your foot (my favorite).  Having never been outside the U.S., I don't know where this idea came from, but I talked about the fact that in another country something as simple as flushing a toilet had to be learned.

26 years later, living in Italy, I think about this job every time I use a public bathroom.  I'm still never quite sure how I'll have to flush the toilet, but I always figure it out.  What stumps me these days is which bathroom I have to use.  The signs on the doors are seldom just stick people with two straight legs for the men's room and a triangle skirt for the women's.  One place has an image of  a person standing on one door and a person sitting on the other, but I know several Italian men that always sit.  I've seen two different hats, but there's a group of men called Alpinis here and they wear hats with big feathers.  There are artistic line drawings, but if I'm not wearing my glasses it's not always easy to distinguish the man from the woman.  I've come to appreciate the simplicity of the stick people.

One of my favorite bars is called the Punky Reggae Pub in Liedolo (see blog You've Gotta Try Sometimes).  To keep the cold out in the winter you're welcomed by a heavy, red velvet curtain at the door.  It's the perfect way to enter this strange, funky place (much more funky than punky).  One might imagine that a bar with a name like this (in Italy, which makes it even funnier) would have some clever signage. Painted on the bathroom doors are the official male and female symbols.  Can I be the only one that doesn't remember the difference between the little circle with the arrow or the one with the cross?

The first time I used this bathroom I'd had to walk through the whole bar to get there.  It wasn't very crowded because old people usually go on the early side.  Therefore, there were just enough other old people to notice me heading for the bathroom, which meant I couldn't immediately turn around and go back to my table when I found myself in gender difficulty.  All I could think of when I reached the doors was the the old kids' program, the Teletubbies, where the characters have different symbols over their heads.  I was sure they had these male/female symbols, so I stood outside the doors for a minute trying to imagine which teletubby was which color and with which symbol.   The only one I could really remember was the purple one with the triangle that got all the publicity for being gay so that didn't help.  I don't remember which bathroom I ended up using that night and I still can't remember which symbol is which.  The only thing I remember is not to use the bathroom at the Punky Reggae Pub.

My other favorite place is a family-run pizzeria in Cassoni, just like almost every other pizzeria in northern Italy.  In the summer at Pizzeria Tramontina you're welcomed by a red, plastic, beaded curtain to keep the mosquitos out.  The 59-year old mom makes the pizzas.  The 32-year old daughter is the waitress and her 8-year old daughter is the waitress' assistant.  The pizziola's (pizza maker's) mom has died, but her old aunt is there every night so it still has a four generation feel.

There's one table in the dining room that always has a special cotton tablecloth with stripes or polka dots or flowers.  It's totally different than the tissue paper tablecloths on the other tables and it never matches the rest of the decor.  This is the family table.  They usually eat around 20:30 (8:30 p.m).  If I want something else at their dinner time or if I'm ready to leave and pay my bill, I always wait until they've finished.  I feel guilty interrupting them.  (Imagine that?  Feeling guilty about bothering the waitress.)      

At Tramontina there's no question as to which bathroom I have to use.  Gioia (Joy), the waitress' assistant, drew a couple of great pictures with magic markers and taped them to the doors.  On the women's room there's a lovely lady that I call Donna dressed in a polka dot dress and polka dot stockings (sometimes she matches the family tablecloth).  I'm not sure where Gioia got the idea to dress her like this.  I think I'm the only one in these conservative little towns that mixes polka dots with polka dots.  In fact, there's a 12-year old boy here that calls me Pippi Calze Lunghe (Pippi Longstocking) because sometimes I even mix in a few stripes.

I call the woman on the door Donna because that's what it says on the sign.  Donna  means woman in Italian.  Gioia should've written Donne (plural for donna), but I didn't correct her because she knows me as the English teacher not the Italian teacher.  Anyway, I like how it translates.  The Woman Room.  And the best part of all is that behind the door of the Woman Room you find a Turkish toilet, also known as an Arabic, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Iranian, Indian, natural position or squat toilet.  So in the end, does it really matter which bathroom I use?