Let us use the bathroom please!

Yesterday I was out having a walk with husband and toddler when I got the dreaded "Mommy I have to go POTTY!!"

This requires quick thinking as the moment of warning does not give us much time and "hold it" means little to a person who is out of diapers for a bit over a month.

Needs: bathroom, close, clean, toilet, not hole in the floor, NOW! I steer the stroller up the ramp of the hotel directly in front of us. There is a party going on in the bar that spills onto the piazza. I have been there a thousand times, know just where the ladies' room is. I walk into the reception area (make the mistake of) and ask to use the bathroom "Downstairs, right?"

Pause. Stare. (Hourglass running out of time).

"Lei e' cliente?"

Well, not today.

"The bathroom is for clients only"

Woman with authoritative stature and voice comes out to see what the problem is. Swoops in, brushes aside the entry level receptionist. The Big Guns have been called in.

"Oh. Lei vuole il bagno. E' cliente? I could understand if you were at the Party outside, then the situation would be completely different"

But it it is for the baby, I plead.

No bathroom for baby. They show me the door. I make some sort of weak attempt to highlight the inevitable consequences of bad Karma in refusing a woman and a child a safe, clean place to pee. I state that I am foreign (no real points for that in Italy, less in Trieste) with Lots of visitors (potential clients, who am I kidding, in ten years only One stayed there, But None in the future, mark my words!!).

I am safely out the door. In case the scene wasn't humiliating enough, one of them follows me out to close the door that until then was a sign of welcome (I work in communications so I am sensitive to these things, but it doesn't take much to interpret that gesture to mean WE ARE CLOSED TO THE RIFF RAFF!)

She still has to go potty, though. I race to the bar across the street where we are Obviously not clients.

"Prego, Signora" The two men show me the way to the bathroom. I dont even have to ask. It is big, it is clean, there is a toilet. Eva takes a piece of toilet paper, cleans the seat (did she learn that at school?), hops on. Does her business. We flush, wash hands, walk out, say Thank You and really mean it.

I know everything about bathrooms in my town. Which ones are clean, which ones are "broken", which ones have changing tables. I can tell a lot about a business just by having to use one.