We've just moved appartments. Apart from the fact that we now have double the surface, there is one very important thing to me, French woman, in this new appartment, and that is the toilet.

In Germany, toilets (except in restaurants) are in the bathroom. Ouch, with the common use of bathroon as a word for toilet in American English, I realize this is rather confusing. So let us agree on a definition here:

Toilet in this post is going to be the seat you sit on to do your thing,

while bathroom is going to be the room that contains, among others, a shower or a bathtub and a sink where you brush your teeth at night.

This agreed upon, let's go back to our toilets. So. In Germany, every single bathroom I have seen has a toilet. The reverse is not true, in the sense that there are houses (and restaurants), where there is also (keyword here being "also") a toilet in... well, a toilet room, by itself.

So we moved, and in this new appartment of ours, there is a "guest toilet" (Gästeklo), that is a toilet in a room by itself. And for me, French, this is great. I must say that I simply hate toilets in the bathroom. To me, the toilet is the seat of foul odors, whereas the bathroom is the place for soap and eau de toilette, i.e. it smells good. So having someone shit (pardon my French) in my bathroom is something I utterly dislike. My parents' home have two toilets, and two bathrooms, all of which are separated (so four rooms total, 16 walls). I don't like someone shitting in my bathroom, no more than I like someone looking at my destroyed toothbrush, or browsing through my towels, or even disliking my eau de toilette. In short, shitting and cleaning oneself are to me two different activities, as different as cooking and sleeping, which usually don't happen in the same room (except in small Parisian studios, but that's another story).

So while we were reviewing the different rooms of our new appartment, I told my German man that we could for example get rid of the toilet in the bathroom to gain space and us that to put a wardrobe, or a shelf, in any case something useful.

His look froze me on the spot.

- You mean get rid of the toilet in the bathroom?
- Yes, that's exactly what I mean.
- Can't do.
- What do you mean, can't do?
- It just can't happen. A bathroom without a toilet is not a bathroom, at least, not here in Germany.

And how can you answer this? You can't. Implacable cultural reality. There's no bathroom in Germany without a toilet. So I'll have to live with it.