Pubs here generally have a urinal with a long trough, some places eg. hotels stations would have shoulder height partitions on urinals, toilet doors would have doors that have about a 4" gap top and bottom with same size side walls in most every place..

Damn, I do enjoy my German toilets...


Back on topic, we even have PC Games like Klomananger Deluxe that digitialize the fun of having toilets, I think...
(http://static5.fore.4pcdn.de/premium/Screenshots/b9/11/92418887-medium.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/klomanager20deluxe20t4hswj.jpg)

I don't think we have a standard here, I've seen a lot of regular doors and hover doors.

Yup, me too. My wife wonders why, despite us being the only two people in the house, I still have to shut the bathroom door.

Here the most usual in the city you´re bound to encounter are urinals without divisions with at least one or two water closet cubicles with doors hovering over 30cm. Then some places have fully closed toilets.
And in the countryside, if it´s an old style house, you´re bound to encounter something I was shocked to use the first time I saw it, is the typical circle hole at ground level or in an elevated platform, where you have to squat, ohh and the fact they´re separate from the house, so if you have to go at night, you better have good night vision capabilities. Those are also usually in public restrooms in the road.
But as someone said in other post, if you´re in the midst of nature, you have a full selection of trees, bushes, rocks (those are the usual restrooms in the road too :D ) and if you happen to be without cover, whatever high grass helps also :P.

And in respect to showers, I think the standard is a big space with showers spouting off walls and columns, no walls between them, so everyone can compare their body parts size : )) (because we now that´s what men and women alike do).
Men and women showers are all the same.

In what respects to privacy, I think it´s a subjective thing, every person has a different "bar" that may comfortably accept in order to go through an activity. Granted, the more pressured you are to go through it, the lower the bar will get. But we are talking standard, controlled situations :P

Tangential, but I am reminded of one of my grandmother's stories about when she worked as a manager at a train station. One of the decisions she had to make entailed determining whether the toilet stall door gaps should be raised or not to make it easier to spot dead junkies during morning inspections. She didn't say what she decided, but now you know one of the reasons public toilet stalls often have a large gap under the door.

I wondered if there was a deliberate removal of privacy in order to prevent people from engaging "in nefarious " activities
as one place put it. I guess even proper locks are discouraged since managers can't open the door if they deem someone has been spending an unreasonable amount of time in a stall. There is also some recommendation as to making it plainly visible when a stall is open, but the recommendation is more for making the doors stay open when not in use, not for seeing feet. In my experience people still have to knock half of the time. Seeing feet isn't always easy once you get close. It mostly just means everyone first walking in knows you're in stall 1, and lets you know if you have a stall buddy.

There are definitely places where people do horrible things to the insides of stalls, so maybe there a bit of loss of right for a given community being pricks, but it would be nice if it didn't ruin it for every environment for the non-nefarious types. I don't need any more kids crawling under the side walls.

I wonder if those doors rust if they get wet, and if part of the reason is they don't want mop water getting on them or them being obstructions to cleaning.

That's what I always suspected. It was for the dead junkie or an Elvis Presley death. Perhaps it's for security to notice more than one person in the stall.

The only one's I don't ever want to use is the hole in the ground, squatting type. To be polite if you miss, you have to score a bogey with your foot.
Another one, no toilet paper. I'm out of the stall quick if they have no toilet paper.

I have no problems with the no divider urinals. I'd rather there be a divider.
But the trough, no thanks. They are usually at sporting events, probably because your typical sports fan is drunk and can't hit the small pot of the urinal...thus a bigger target and some with the added benefit of ice. Not sure why ice is in a trough, but have seen it on more than one occasion.

Well, it's a design decision. Design decisions are, by virtue of being design decisions, always multi-faceted. In this case, dead junkies was the overriding concern, however.

It's a cheap way of reducing odour and discouraging flies, according to Google.

In some Filipino places I've been in, they don't even have a trough. It's just a gutter along one wall that everybody pees in. No dividers, not even any lane markings.
As to Germany, I was amused with a toilet I saw which had a ledge in the bowl that was higher than the water level. A buddy laid a huge #2 that sat on the ledge. The flush wasn't powerful enough to move it. He then of course went to the next stall, stood on that toilet and took a picture of his business from the top down view.

Were there any drink cans or bottles in the ice? If so then you were in the wrong room!



I used to have privacy issues about such things, but the US Army cured me of that. Showering each morning meant hanging your towel on a wall hook and standing in a long line of guys wearing nothing but the bar of soap in your hands. When you got to the front of the line you saw the shower was just a room with 4 shower heads and a drain in the middle. You moved to the far end of the shower and waited for an open stream of water. You went in and got good and wet first, then you moved to the dry area between the heads to soap up. Upon leaving your stream someone else jumped into it so you had to wait for another opening before you could rinse off. It may sound horrifying, but after a few years you get used to it. Although it became kind of wierd again when the whole Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy came about. I can guarantee you that none of those making that desicion were taking showers in our barracks.

There were also the random drug tests that happened every few months. Not too many people objected about having to pee in a jar, mostly it was about having someone there to watch and verify that it was really your pee in the jar. No joke, there was a guy who would squat down next to the urinal, stare at you for a second or two then say "OK... Go." You thing it's hard to go with other people in room? Try having this dudes face literally inches away. The term Shy Bladder took on a whole new meaning for me after that. And again Don't Ask, Don't Tell kept coming back to me during the whole thing.

By comparison most public facilities have more that enough privacy for me now. Well except for that one truck stop in Arizona that actually had a hole in the wall between the two stalls. I had always thought that sort of thing was a joke, but there it was quasi covered by piece of cardboard with some duct tape.

Ah, the wonderful world of boot camp. I do not miss those days one bit.

Yeah, the worst thing about the random drug tests was they didn't let you know before you took your morning piss. So, I'd have to chug a couple bottles of water and wait for them to pass through my system. Which ended up filling the piss bottle and making the watcher wait while I finished up in the urinal.

When I was in High School I was taking a leak in a cubicle and suddenly 5 juniors decided to run in cubical next to me and jump on toilet to watch
Since then I haven't been able to use urinals or piss when I know someone else is in toilet
Then again same schools urinal was basically a bloody trench with no walls or anything which basically said sod privacy
Public toilets are basically public affairs these days sadly

ROFL.....................I would understand missing your target when doing nubmer 1, but missing your target when doing number 2 is just.............too much. I mean the hole* is big enough for a foot to enter there (not that a foot would like to enter there anyways) so unless the issue comes from a very bad case of eye-butt coordination I couldn´t find another explanation, maybe the force applied to the projectile making it surpass sound speed barrier and causing it to splatter, but even so, a water closet wouldn´t be of any help. :D

Now in what respects to paper, you would be astonished to discover how much use you can get out of a 10cm square piece. In these cases Origami saves your life : ))

Edit: *refers to the hole in the ground ( ! O _ O)