The old train station in Katowice won the World’s Most Beautiful Concrete Building award many years ago. But winning the world’s most beautiful concrete building is like coming last in an ugly baby competition. You’re not the ugliest thing in the room, but you’re still smashed asshole ugly. But not everything survives progress’s onslaught and the old train station has been torn down. Now, it’s all glass, tv screens and international chain coffee shops. Starbucks, McDonalds and Subway abound. If you had a rock and a decent throwing arm, you could reduce it all to the broken shards of an architect's dream in seconds. The toilets too are a chain enterprise from a company called 2theloo. In an English speaking country the name is a clever play on words, but we are not in an English speaking country. Here we speak Polish, or the Silesian dialect. So for the most part, the word play, like the sign above the toilet entrance, goes over most people’s heads. It’s the same as if we use...
Welcome to Bog Trotter, a travel blog about the toilets of southern Poland. In case you don't know, a Bog Trotter is someone from the Irish countryside who had the cheek to up sticks and move from his country squalor in search of a better life. In Ireland, a bog is also slang for the toilet and “The Trots” is slang for diarrhoea. So now that we have nicely set the tone let’s explore the toilets of the Slavic south.