August, 2008 - Philadelphia, USA

I was laying on the carpet, kneecaps facing upwards and my torso rolled onto one side. An ashtray the size of my head was blocking my view of Jess and the whirls of smoke drifting up from it were fine to look at anyways. Years of interacting and seeing her expressions had given me plenty of familiarity with what her face looked like in most situations.

“I wonder if they have cats in Germany.”

As soon as the words fell out of my mouth I knew I’d said something hilariously naive. Jess started giggling, which started me off, and our giggles turned into uncontrollable laughter until our stomach and face muscles started to hurt. That’s one of the benefits of having virtually no filter between my brain and mouth, a tendency to indulge in discussion of way too much information, and people who love me because of those qualities.

One of the four cats in our house batted a cigarette butt out of the ashtray and across the living room floor.

There was a McDonald’s a few blocks away, on the intersection of our cross street and Broad.

October, 2008 - Berlin, Germany

They did, in fact, have cats. Hauskatze. Three of the other Digital Playground girls and I had walked down the street, away from the hotel we’d been marooned at upon arrival and passed a store window with a cat in it. In this case, I suppose it would be a geschaftkatze. I was disproportionately excited, but things that were only funny because of the people you were with aren’t funny to the ones that weren’t there, so the girls let me laugh to myself for a moment and continued on their search for frozen yogurt. 

They settled for something vaguely dessert-y and probably milk based at McDonald’s, across the street from the hotel.

August, 2011 - Matsue, Japan

The word for cat here is neko. You see flashes of them at night between the living containers on the circus lot, strays looking for food. 

There’s a McDonald’s across the street.

I think you’ve gotten the idea by now, but just in case: 

1) I have now visited a sizable portion of the developed world. 

2) Cats and McDonald’s appear to be universal. Also, there is usually a FedEx lurking somewhere in town and a Starbucks if I’m lucky.

Until Tuesday evening, I thought toilet paper was universal as well. I never consciously thought about whether toilet paper was universal, I just assumed it was. Hah.

The living situation here involves asian-style port-a-potties and little eight square-foot shower cubicles. By asian-style toilets I mean there’s a rectangular trough in the ground over which you’re expected to squat. I’m still not sure which way you’re supposed to face, and I have yet to figure out a way of situating myself that doesn’t feel like I’m about to fall in. All of this in a blue plastic box which sits in the sun and does double duty as the most disgusting sauna in the world. It’s firmly in the category of ‘roughing it’ with a healthy dose of ‘culture shock’ added in. Occasionally, I develop an intense yearning for a real bath, which Matt does his best to accommodate by taking me to a hotel. This requires walking through the park that the circus is set up in, down a street flanked by sa-ka-su (circus) signs in Katakana, over a long bridge, and past the train station. 

Three quarters of the way over the bridge my intestines let me know that I was going to pay, and pay dearly, for the mistake of allowing my period to happen during the same time that I was living on a diet of coffee and lots of accidentally ingested soy-based products. I am allergic to soy. Not crazy life-threatening anaphylactic shock-inducing allergic, but definitely uncomfortable reaction-allergic.  Everything here has soy in it and my difficulty with the language barrier means that sometimes I manage to get food with no soy and sometimes it ends up with extra soy, or other times they leave off the soy sauce but it’s still a plate of tofu. I, being a lady and very much wanting to believe that Matt was falling for my insistence that kittens and sunshine were the only things that came out of my asshole, gritted my teeth and trudged on. We took a right at the train station and the hotel was in sight. 

“Man, I really have to go to the bathroom.”

Aha! Matt needed a restroom. Here was my opportunity to escape into the ladies’ without having to let on that I desperately needed to go do something really gross involving an orifice right next to the one I encourage him to put his face on regularly.

“There’s one right here in the train station.”

“It’s ok, I can wait.”

“No, there’s the whole check-in process and we might decide we don’t like this hotel once we see the lobby and it’d really be better to just use the toilet here.”

“I’m fine.”

Aw maaaaan. I hated that moment. Things… gastronomic distress things… they were going to happen within the next fifteen feet and I could either use those fifteen feet to get halfway to the front door of the hotel or I could suck it up, look Matt in the eyes and say

“No. I want to go to the bathroom in the train station. Now.”

He looked back at me. His eyes sparkled with the glee of all people who have XY chromosomes and their inevitable desire to tease those who touch their penises about gross things. I turned and ran, partly from his knowing gaze but mostly because my priority was dashing through the train station and into the ladies’ room as quickly as possible. I flew past a small, hunched elderly woman and mumbled ‘sumimasen’ as I threw myself into a stall with a blissfully western toilet. An American style toilet, sadly, not one of the space-ship level Washlets which I *will* import and install in my apartment one day. It wasn’t until I was seated with my pants around my ankles and things were progressing that I realized something wasn’t right.

Something was off about the stall. It was like one of those puzzles where you have to find eight differences between the two nearly identical cartoons. 

There was no toilet paper.

There was no empty roll.

There was no toilet paper holder installed on the wall, or sticking up from the floor, or even hidden nearly behind the toilet on either side of the bowl.

There was, however, a bucket with a rag in it.

Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable. 

I wanted to scream profanities, but it seemed rude. Instead, I gave my rear end a good shake, stood up, and shuffled - with my pants still around my ankles - out of the stall to look for a roll of paper in one of the other ones. They were all empty, and they were all devoid of any sign that toilet paper existed. 

There were, however, more buckets. With rags.

I had crossed into an alternate dimension where women didn’t need paper products in their powder rooms. The only explanation was that they obviously really DID shit kittens and sunshine. Actually, I was so freaked out that the inside of my brain had started to sound like a crazy person and I needed to calm down and evaluate my options.

I had a small suitcase with me, containing 20 pounds of girly bath products, 10 pounds of electronics, a change of clothes for me, a clean t-shirt for Matt, and a notebook.

Notebooks are made from paper.

Matt was leaning against a column when I came out. I looked like a woman who had just been emotionally scarred by the experience of wiping her ass with notebook paper. 

“Feel better?”

“No.”

“There’s no toilet paper in there.”

“I know - I found that out the hard way.”

At that point I figured telling him my one horrible story was better than letting his brain come up with 95 different horrifying scenarios. Matt started laughing at me, and then with me. It turned into uncontrollable laughter as we made our way into the hotel lobby and up to the front desk. That’s one of the benefits of having virtually no filter between my brain and mouth, a tendency to indulge in discussion of way too much information, and people who love me because of those qualities.

I still want to know what the hell was up with those buckets full of rags.