Today was the first day of a 6-month sabbatical (for Armando)/vacation (for Tonia), which will feature 3 months in Lausanne, Switzerland (Armando visiting EPFL) and 3 months in Seville, Spain (Armando visiting U. Sevilla).
I don’t blog well, but people asked me to blog, so.
We both love traveling and deal with it well. But I also believe travel makes you appreciate things you take for granted about your own life.
In that spirit, consider the shower configuration at the AirBnB we just moved into (for a nominal 3 month stay) near Lausanne.
The question, of course, is: How, in this configuration, does one shower thoroughly without soaking the bathroom?
Note the mounting of the shower head. You would think that if you sit in the corner, penitent, aiming only a light spray of water at yourself, you could avoid back-splashing water onto the floor. You would be wrong. The floor is, of course, polished marble, so it's lethally slippery when wet.
If one tries to stand, the shower head cannot be moved above face level. Of the possible orientations the showerhead can assume, more than 3/4 of them spray directly into the rest of the bathroom. Changing the angle of the shower head with respect to the perpendicular is not possible. There is, sadistically, no bath mat or even spare towel to absorb the inevitable overspray.
To me, this is incomprehensible austerity.
As I write this, I am clean, but the dirty clothing I removed was pressed into service as a floor towel before being thrown in the hamper. A better way must be found. Tonia discovered that if you sit on the floor of the tub, you can do much better splash-wise.
On the upside: the house has a baby grand Ritmüller piano (the bass is a bit tubby, but hey, a piano!), our German housemate Pieter is away 4-day weekends with his family in Brussels so we frequently have the upper floor to ourselves, we had a pizza for dinner that didn’t suck, and a thunderstorm is happening now, which is rare in the Bay Area.
So it should be an interesting experience. Stay tuned for more posts that may make some things sound worse than they really are, because this is going to be great.
Now…melatonin, ho.
I don’t blog well, but people asked me to blog, so.
We both love traveling and deal with it well. But I also believe travel makes you appreciate things you take for granted about your own life.
In that spirit, consider the shower configuration at the AirBnB we just moved into (for a nominal 3 month stay) near Lausanne.
Note the mounting of the shower head. You would think that if you sit in the corner, penitent, aiming only a light spray of water at yourself, you could avoid back-splashing water onto the floor. You would be wrong. The floor is, of course, polished marble, so it's lethally slippery when wet.
If one tries to stand, the shower head cannot be moved above face level. Of the possible orientations the showerhead can assume, more than 3/4 of them spray directly into the rest of the bathroom. Changing the angle of the shower head with respect to the perpendicular is not possible. There is, sadistically, no bath mat or even spare towel to absorb the inevitable overspray.
To me, this is incomprehensible austerity.
As I write this, I am clean, but the dirty clothing I removed was pressed into service as a floor towel before being thrown in the hamper. A better way must be found. Tonia discovered that if you sit on the floor of the tub, you can do much better splash-wise.
On the upside: the house has a baby grand Ritmüller piano (the bass is a bit tubby, but hey, a piano!), our German housemate Pieter is away 4-day weekends with his family in Brussels so we frequently have the upper floor to ourselves, we had a pizza for dinner that didn’t suck, and a thunderstorm is happening now, which is rare in the Bay Area.
So it should be an interesting experience. Stay tuned for more posts that may make some things sound worse than they really are, because this is going to be great.
Now…melatonin, ho.
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