Showers Should not be this Complicated

 

Showers are not terribly complicated from a mechanical standpoint. The technology that works them hasn’t changed all that much since it was invented a few hundred years ago. This being true, why on earth are showers so difficult in Europe? First off, there’s the dreaded “handshower”, you know, where the showerhead is has the little hose and isn’t attached at the top of the shower? If it just had the hose and an attachment high up, it would be all fancy, but since it doesn’t, you have to do all the aiming and have nowhere to put the showerhead besides the floor otherwise. You can never relax because you always have to be holding the showerhead, otherwise its showering water all over the place.

The handshower makes the next peculiarity of European showers particularly insensible: no shower curtain. Why? Seriously, I cannot think of a good reason not to have a shower curtain. Do Europeans just really like to get their whole bathroom wet when they shower? Its not like the shower curtain is a super-modern or expensive item either, so I don’t know what’s holding them back. They have regular curtains, like for windows and such, so clearly they are aware of the concept. We can keep the sun out our rooms, but not the water out of the bathroom? It doesn’t make any sense!

Now some showers do have curtains, but they’re so flawed as to be useless. For instance, one of the shower curtains I’ve encountered was about three and a half feet long and about five and a half feet off the ground (and hung from a curtain rod just outside the shower). What then, is the purpose of this? Its hardly blocking any water, and what it does catch drips off of it right into the main part of the bathroom. Why bother at all then?

Another baffling feature of European showers is that some aren’t at all differentiated from the rest of the room. Not only don’t they have a curtain, but they also don’t have anything on the floor, like a little ledge to keep water from running into the main part of a bathroom. Is this a personal preference this? Are there really just a bunch o Europeans who enjoy that flooded-bathroom feeling after every shower? Sometimes I hear people tell me that they want to move to Europe and become European, but if this is their attitude about showering (which should be a really uncomplex issue), I’ll keep my luxurious American bathrooms, thanks.