Halfway down the Danube

The Worst Bathroom in the Balkans

Okay, probably not the very worst. But definitely the worst one I've yet found.

It's in the big park just west of the center of Oltenita. Oltenita is a small city on the Danube; we went there this weekend, for no particular reason. It's pronounced ol ten EETS ah -- I don't know how to make the special Romanian "ts" character here.

Oltenita is one of those places that, when you tell Romanians that you're going there, they look at you and say, "Uhhh... why?"

And there's not much there, it's true. It's a town of about 50,000 people. It's on the Danube, but there's no waterfront or anything like that. There are no major tourist attractions except for an archeological museum. Googling "Oltenita tourism" gives you... not much.

But, what the hell. We felt like a day trip, and it's less than two hours from our house.

-- The bathroom, yes. Driving into town from the west -- the road that goes to Giurgiu -- we passed a large park, maybe half a kilometer from the center of the city. We needed to run the kids around, so we stopped.

The park was actually quite nice. Lots of little paths among trees and neatly mowed grass. A small and rather touching war memorial. Little kids chalking hopscotch designs on the asphalt, older kids on roller blades. The whole thing overlooked by a lovely old water tower -- in prewar Romania they put roofs on those, so that they could double as fire-watching stations. And in the back, a very nice playground with swings and see-saws and slides, full of kids playing and yelling and running around.

All good; we stopped, turned the kids loose. Alan began going up and down the slides, David was appropriated by a group of girls who put him on the seesaw. But then I realized that I had been drinking a lot of water while driving -- our car has no aircon, so I open the window, which makes it thirsty work. So I went to look for the toilet.

...Nobody likes a complainer. And I am not squeamish. I've used toilets in the Philippines, in rural Indonesia, in South Serbia. I'm okay with (for instance) Turkish "squat" toilets; I don't love them, but I'll use them. I'm okay with rural outhouses. I'll use the "chemical" toilets in public parks.

But this place was... well, it was a concrete bunker, just a few yards away from the playground. The concrete was crumbling and the whole place looked ready to collapse.

There were two open entrances. No doors. Inside, no light, no running water, no windows. Just a trough to one side, and a squat-hole in a little doorless closet at the back.

And flies. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of fat black flies. They rose up in a buzzing cloud as soon as I entered. A moment later they started landing on me, tickling my skin with their hairy legs.

The smell... well, never mind. What really startled me was that it was obvious this toilet had been used. Recently. A lot.

I backed out, then -- in a tribute to the power of pure curiosity -- stuck my head in the female side. It was exactly the same, except that it didn't have the trench.

What made it shocking was that the rest of the park was so nice. Oltenita isn't a rich town, but you could see that someone was taking care of the park and the playground. (It was better than a lot of playgrounds here in Bucharest.) But either they just didn't care about the toilet, or they'd simply given up.

Yet obviously people were desperate enough to use the horrible, horrible toilets anyhow. So, surely it would be possible to have decent toilets instead. The standard Central and Eastern European solution here -- and it's not a bad one -- is to have a pensioner who collects a few thousand lei (maybe 10 or 15 cents) from each person. If there's a "customer" every few minutes, then in a day the toilet collects enough to pay the pensioner, plus a little left over for cleaning supplies. Result: jobs for a couple of pensioners, and clean public toilets.

I'm guessing that the reason this isn't happening in Oltenita is because the toilets are so horrible and badly designed (no water, no windows, no lights, no doors) that the "pensioner" system won't work; and the city can't pay for new ones.

Well... maybe there's an EU grant that could help? -- I'm serious, and it would actually be one of the more sensible things for the EU to spend money on. The thought of kids going from the bright cheerful playground into that buzzing, stinking darkness makes my head hurt.

(Oddly enough, the Cleanest Toilet in the Balkans is just a few miles up the Danube, across the river in Bulgaria. Go figure.)

Posted by douglas at May 3, 2004 02:40 PM