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 used Asian characters to hilariously name a public toilet in Dublin, with a double entendre that only 50 year olds from Northern Nepal would get.
It’s Poland, so you’ve got to pay for the loo. There is a robotic turnstile in place of the traditional old female toilet attendant. Its cold metal truncheon across your legs stops you dead in your tracks. Only then do you look up to see that it is not the usual two zlota you have to pay but two fifty. You thought that getting the two zlota change was hard, let me know how getting that fifty groze goes.
There is a seperate area for washing your hands with smooth, round basins and sensors everywhere so you don’t need to touch anything. It’s spacious, futuristic and sterile. There are more mirrors here than on the ceiling of a bordello.
In the cubicles, behind the toilet there is a shelf for your bags if you’re not a fan of dropping them into puddles of other people’s poor aim. The cubicle walls are adorned with graphics of people over-enthusiastically loving being alive. But in the middle of all of this life affirming imagery the image that stands out the most is that of a smiling attractive woman, sitting on the loo with her unmentionables around her ankles. I’m told that in the ladies there is an equivalent one of a man. I’ve thought about this in depth, and apart from appealing to the pervert fringe, I wonder what the message is here? Beautiful people go to? You should be having as much fun as this woman? Or is it purely instructional?
As I leave I turn and for the first time in my life say goodbye to a toilet. Toodle-oo!
Oh, hahaha, I get it. Very clever.
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