Toilets

Lucca (Italy), morning

Yesterday I had to go to the Spanish consulate in Genova to hand in a grant application. I obviously took the train, first because I love trains (and to love trains here in Italy we need to be kind of brave) and second because in theory it is the easiest (and more environment-friendly) way to get to places. I fortunately got an earlier train of the one I was supposed to take. Fortunately because the one I planned to take had an hour delay. This blog is not anyway about my train trip, but more about the toilets in the Italian trains. There is something I don't understand about it. I am not tall, but I am also not that small. I guess that is compared with the Italian average height, I am of some cm above it.
I can see why when I was in Holland the toilets where always too high for me and I needed to stand in some weird position to be able to pee without sitting on it (I never sit on public toilets. Bleah!). Dutch people are on the average much much taller than I am and so of course they make toilets for the average sized person and not for someone shorter like me, but in Italy................I am wondering how people shorter than me can pee using the toilets of the Italian trains. Probably they just wait to get to the final destination and once there they run to the first public toilet, where the toilet sits are of a "normal" height. I am not a man, so I cannot just pee standing and if I don't want to sit on the toilet (never!), then I always have to find a way of peeing while touching as less as possible of the bathroom and climb to a position in which I can pee into the toilet and not on my pants or on the floor, all this while the train has the classical shaking movement. I have to admit that this is a challenge. I wonder of how other Italian women deal with this problem. Maybe I should start a survey across the country to see if there is a gradient of toilets' height from North to South and how they are in other countries.....