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Saturday, June 19, 2010

Public toilets

When you are a traveller and in a place you are unfamiliar with, public toilets and amenities become important. The trend to be out of your room by 10am or 11am and then your flight is not until 5 hours or so later , or you book in at 2pm and your flight arrives at 11am puts the pressure on to be able to easily locate public toilets in good condition. Some places do not seem to believe you need them or that you should pay. Adelaide is well set up for toilets. They are there at the station, in the department stores , the Botanic Gardens, the fast food shops. There are toilets at the beach and mostly these public toilets are in good condition. Once in a while you get the vandal attacks on the beach ones. They are always at shopping centres and our suburbs have shopping centres. So toilets are easy to locate here. It was very difficult in Melbourne locating toilets. I ran around the city following signs which just ran me around more. I eventually found some in the GPO building up several flights. Melbourne is not good on toilets. Noumea has them but you have to pay or they are locked. Sydney wins my current prize. If there were a world competition on the best public toilets it would have to be Sydney as the winner. The toilets are visible, plentiful, scrupulously clean and patrolled. It is so easy to find a toilet in Sydney and they are all so clean. If travelling is part of our life style and the times create problems then toilets become important.I didn't notice anyone in Sydney going to any kind of a huge effort to get these toilets in such a good state, but it must be built into their daily routine...and the location of them means it goes into their planning too. It is then followed up with community co operation to keep these toilets in good order.

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