In keeping with yesterday's "Bathroom" theme...

I am no longer welcome at the McDonald's on the Causeway...

Many years ago, not long after DH and I moved to The Sandbox, we decided we were going to go to Bahrain for dinner. It was a pleasant spring evening and I had a little sundress on and no black bag covering. Don't have to wear one in Bahrain. Plenty of skin showing - bare arms, legs, neck, a little cleavage too. Gorgeous shoes to match the dress [but, of course!]. DH and I have dinner and then go out for a few beverages after dinner, and then head back to Saudi. I never should have left Bahrain without taking a quick trip to the ladies room before getting in the truck to head home - but I did.

We get through customs and I tell DH that he is going to have to stop at McDonald's for me - that I've got to pee. No problem. DH swings the truck into the parking lot and my intention is to run in, do my business, and so as not to be rude and an unpaying guest get a vanilla milkshake.

I jump out of the truck and go into McDonald's and only briefly and quickly glance at the sign on the door and immediately enter. I only wish I had the pictures of the signs that depict which room is for men and which is for ladies. They look so much alike. They are not the standard which you would be used to seeing in the States with the woman wearing a dress and the man wearing pants. [Men wear dresses, here.]

Surely that I drank an entire bottle of wine by myself at dinner and then topped that off with a couple of vodka and soda's afterward had no effect whatsoever in impairing my eyesight or "snap judgment" as to which door I needed to enter. You see where this is going... I went into what I was pretty sure was the ladies room and apparently the fact that there was a urinal on the wall didn't phase me in the least or offer me, at that time in my inebriated state, a clue as to the fact that I was in the WRONG room. I had two choices - a quick glance at odd signs - and a fifty-fifty chance of choosing the RIGHT room. I did my business, washed my hands, and opened the door to exit the ladies men's room. Standing outside waiting for me was the entire McDonald's crew shouting at me that I was in the men's room and they were armed with all of their cleaning stuff as though I had just committed such a foul act that the entire restroom was going to have to be thoroughly sanitized, if not demolished. They were not happy McDonald's workers. Oopsie. Sorry 'bout that guys.

Needless to say - with all of the men sitting at their tables dressed in their white thobes and red and white checkered ghutras - every single one of them giving me the evil eye - whether it was because I had committed the crime of accidentally using the men's room instead of the ladies room, or whether it was because I had committed the crime of not being fully covered by a black bag and had the audacity to show some bare skin, I will never know. That, coupled with the entire Filipino and Indian staff yelling at me - I immediately left and never got my vanilla milkshake. And, I have never been back to the McDonald's since. I'd be willing to wager a bet that one of the men there - one of the Saudi's - used his camera to snap a quick picture of the "undressed American woman" who used the men's room and that that picture was then blown up and posted on the entry-way door of that McDonald's with an "X" on it - as if to make it ultimately clear that THIS American woman is not allowed to enter THAT McDonald's.

And that is today's bathroom story... It seemed scarier and funnier at the time. Guess it is one of those things where you probably had to be there.

[This is a sign from a Dubai. The signs in Saudi look pretty much the same. No doubt, had we have been here in The Sandbox longer than we had at the time - I would have know that the "white" picture is for the men's room and that the "black" picture is for the ladies room. I know now!]