“The Toilet is in Backwards”

I don't know what time they all left, but they did, and we were left to explore the flat briefly before turning in for the night. Of particular interest, and I say that as a man who doesn't normally pay a lot of interest to these things, was the toilet.

It was, how can I say this ... backwards. In a normal English toilet, the water is positioned at the rear end of the seated area, so that, anything that drops, as it were, drops directly into the water. Not in this case. The water was at the front, and anything that dropped in there, from a seated person, would drop onto a shelf, where it would remain until it was flushed away.

I can see obvious benefits to this system… if you happen to be the kind of person who likes to search through what they've done afterwards. For the rest of us, it was just a little bizarre. I’ve heard that the soviet regime was intrusive, but surely there are some things in life that should be left unexamined.

Jonathan told me that they had a similar arrangement in Germany when he was a child, and this had been a certain source of amusement for all the children there. You do your business, 'et voila!' For that entire week, I couldn't use that toilet without laughing. 'Et voila'.

But enough toilet humour. Due to our fun and games at the border, we'd missed a day here, but tomorrow we could get on with what we'd come here for.

As a magnanimous gesture Jonathan gave me the choice of beds, and feeling equally magnanimous I let him have the one with the Barney the Dinosaur duvet cover.

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