Excuse me, where’s the bathroom? Part 1

As a matter of practicality, one of the first things you learn when you’re in a foreign country is how to ask where the bathroom is. Eventually, you learn the cultural conventions — such as, in Argentina, the bathroom is almost always one floor up or one floor down from the main level. (There’s a lot of work to be done to make this place mobility accessible!)

Quickly, I learned to find the general bathroom location without asking, but then I was faced with a different dilemma: Sometimes the signs indicating gendered bathrooms confused me. This comes from growing up in the United States, where bathroom signs are usually “M” (for men) and “W” or “L” (for women / ladies). So naturally, when I see a big “M” on the door, I habitually turn around to use the other one.

Here, however, I often come upon a set of doors labeled with “M” and “H” (“M” = mujeres / women and “H” = hombres / men). I can’t count the number of times I’ve stood in a hallway and did the bathroom hokey-pokey, turning-myself-about multiple times until I was confident that “M” was indeed the correct choice.

One fine day I actually ended up in the “wrong” bathroom, became quite amused at my own predicament, and decided to document bathroom door signs for fun and profit.

In my defense, I thought this door was showing a woman wearing a dress, until I realized that “H” is for “hombre”:

And I thought this door was showing a tie (like a suit-and-tie tie) untilI realized that “M” is for “mujer” and this is actually a woman in a dress …?