When you travel it is an adventure but it removes you from your familiar surroundings, things which are your creature comforts. You don't know what you'll miss till you don't have it for a week. I cannot express how overjoyed I was last night to have my own pillows squished to the exact specifications of my own massive noggin, my huge soft bed, covers just the right warmth and thickness, and the comfort of my own shower and toilet to take care of my "business" at my leisure.
Toilet paper in Europe is no good. If you ever saw the episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" where Cheryl uses only the scratchy, eco-friendly super thin crap and Larry replaces it with regular soft stuff, you recognize the humor in this. On one hand, yes, chopping down trees is sad. It depletes the environment which reduces our supply of oxygen, blah, blah, blah. Thanks to folks like Al Gore and Cameron Diaz, you can always be sure to know what "green thing" we are NOT doing in order to screw our planet. But when I sit upon the porcelain throne, whether it be something that requires one flush or two, I would like to wipe my ass with a material that is soft, cushy, absorbent, and doesn't give me a paper cuts on my labes. And Cameron, I will never use the potty at your house because I've heard your motto is "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down." I'm sure your Beverly Hills eco-friendly mansion smells just like the truckstop restroom in Sawyer, Michigan. I guess you can't buy class.
And speaking of double flushes, European toilets often give you a choice in your flushing needs. There was a yin-yang shaped button on the back of our toilet in Paris, half of it being larger than the other. This button I fondly labeled "Grossen Shitzen", which in my German jive speak means "big shit". [Sultan really does speak German and claims I am FULL of shit but I think this is a funny title so it stays.] There are no massive water tanks on the backs of any toilets to flush 7000 gallons of water (or whatever I wasted when I flushed that Kleenex, sorry, Al..) If you are fond of leaving "upper deckers", where you leave a dump in the tank and people wonder for weeks where the fresh shit smell is coming from before they figure it out, you will have no game with this prank in Europe.
In Strasbourg we had a very large bed with very sparse covers. It was chilly sleeping with my sheet and summer gauze blanket, even though it was snowing outside. In Paris we had a small bed with poofy hot covers which made me sweat like Oprah at an All-You-Can-Eat buffet. I felt like Goldilocks except nothing was just right. In Paris and Strasbourg we had square pillows. This sounds like no big deal but these polyester lump bags cause neck cramps, writhing around, and exclamations of "mother fuckin' pillows!!" many times throughout the night. If you couple this sleeping obstacle with the fact that I began to depend on my Ambien, which is a sleeping pill that's a wee bit addictive, I was a mess. I decided to go cold turkey on my last night, no Ambien to seduce me into LaLa Land or even a Xanax to relax me. By the way, I'm not some junkie on this shit, I just like to cope with jetlag the best way I know how---drugs. I was a tornado of restless legs, flailing covers, and square pillows being punched and folded every ten minutes. My eyes were more bloodshot than Jerry Louis on hour 23 of the Labor Day Telethon. I know Sultan LOVED sleeping next to me that night...
If you would like to stand out as a complete American, by all means, please wear your brand new white Keds leather sneakers and socks with coordinating pom poms at your heels. It is written in some "Only Americans Do This" code that blindingly white sneakers are reserved for those visitors who ask, "Does this menu come in English?" or "Where is the closest McDonald's?". I even thought I could pass as comfortable and stylish with my plum and grey-colored Adidas running shoes. Nope, welcome to Paris, you American Asswipe. Would you like fries with that? The French set the trend last time we visited and it was clearly the case again. It was all about the skinny jeans tucked into tall boots with low heels. No stillettos, no boot-cut jeans, no wide-leg pants that all the stores in the USA claim are so hot. I looked like I bought my pants from the "Before" cast of The Biggest Loser with my ultra wide-legged trousers as I strolled about the city. The only day I felt cool is when I discovered the real reason I hated skinny jeans all this time, and it's not because I needed to be an anorexic teenager to wear them. American jeans suck ass!!! I found a pair that, gasp!, was not low-rise down to my ass crack, did not make me look like a denim kielbasa, and I could actually sit down in without feeling like I had a clitorectomy. Praise be the creator of these French jeans that made me look, well, FRENCH!!!
For a few days, I felt cool, not quite like a local, but cool enough to cope. I no longer felt like Rusty in European Vacation with his embroidered beret. I almost felt like joining the crusade in the strike the railway workers were having (does every fucking place we go have to be striking?....). French people don't rent other protestors for their cause, that's only here in the lazy States. I kept looking for a giant infaltable protest rat, with it's beret and hand-rolled cigarette but I found none. So I returned to the good old USA after my 9 hour flight (good Lord..) a little more cultured, a little constipated, and a lot more stylish. Je t'aime Paris!!! But I also love my All-American toilet paper, too. Charmin rocks my world.
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