Yesterday I found myself in the Philadelphia airport waiting for connecting flight. At more than one point in my multi-hour stay at said airport, I found myself needing to use the "facilities." I was quite surprised at the men's room's design and arrangement. You enter a long room with urinals on the right side, sinks on the left side and stalls in the back. The urinals are fairly standard. The thing that is odd is that there is a mirror along the whole wall over the urinals. This mean you can look yourself in the eye as you are doing your business. This also means you can look your neighbor in the eye without having to turn your head to do so. Not only that, but the sink wall (which is opposite from the urinal wall) also has a mirror running its full length. This means than not only can you look yourself in the eye, you can make eye contact with almost anyone in the room. I must say, the arrangement felt a little awkward. I'm a fairly private individual and a shoe-gazer by nature so don't much care for eye-contact in public rest rooms. I have thought it'd be amusing and awkward to make a public rest room where the urinals were mounted facing each other on a half wall... just to make things awkward. The bathrooms in PHL aren't quite that bad, but they gave me a feel for what it could be like.
Incidentally, one of the more interesting places I've urinated was at the Virginia Military Institute's football stadium. They didn't have urinals, they had a section of wall with a trough and drain at the bottom of it. They had water running down the wall and the gents can line up next to each other and pee on the wall. I was the only one in there at the time so I didn't have to stand shoulder to shoulder with a
keydet and I was glad for that.
