On our drive up to Scotland from London, we stayed in a little town called Durham. We didn't make plans to stay there, it was just the closest place around at the time our eyes started to get droopy. I awoke early Saturday morning and went for a lovely run in and around town (Saturday mornings before 7 am is truly like living in another world...everything is so serenely beautiful and eerily quiet). When I got back to the hotel and went to take a shower, I tried to be very quiet so as not to wake Tamara and Alex from their slumber. So there I am in the bathroom, yes naked, waiting to get in the shower when I am faced with this plumbing set-up:
You'll have to excuse my Microsoft Paint skills, but this is the best I could do. The top circle is the shower head. The middle bar is a bar with a knob on either end. The red and blue circles are other knobs. The thing that looks like Barbra Streisand's nose is the tub faucet.In this case, what would you think? Which knobs would you turn? Well, if you're anything like me, you turned the red knob first. And boom. Out came scalding hot water from the tub faucet. Okay, okay. Not a terrible start. I turned the blue knob a bit to minimize the chance of burning my skin while I continued my Shower Lesson In The Nude. And so now there is a gushing of tepid water pouring from the tub faucet. But how do I get the water to come from the shower head? Oh, I know. I'll turn one of the higher-up knobs. Yes. Good idea. So I turn the knob on the left. The stream of water from the tub remains the same, but now there is also a freezing cold spray coming from the shower head. Well, that certainly wasn't right. So I turned that one off. Then I turned the right higher-up knob. Same exact thing. So then I did a combination of the two higher-up knobs but with always the same result. How in the hell? This went on for 8 minutes. Alex later told me he could hear me audibly say "What?!" from the bedroom. I would have said way more than that, but again, I was trying to be quietly polite.
After those very chilly 8 minutes (for, by now, the sweat had cooled on my body and the cold floor tiles weren't helping matters), I gave up. But I couldn't NOT clean myself because I had just run for 70 minutes and was stinky. So I only had one option left. I would have to take a bath. I put the plug in the drain and waited for the warm water to fill the tub (since that was the only faucet I knew how to draw forth warm water). But I was so cold while I was waiting!!! So I got in the tub when there was maybe an inch of water covering the bottom. And there I am sitting in tortoise pose splashing the water over my back, face, and hair EXACTLY the way Will Ferrell did in Elf when he was forced to shower in the elfin bathroom. Even as I was doing it, I realized what a ridiculous, sad sight it must have been.
But here's the kicker. When the tub finally filled, I went to turn off the faucets and as I did, scorching water started spraying out of the showerhead onto me. It took everything I had not to scream Janet Leigh style. I quickly undid whatever the hell it was I had just done. Thinking, thinking, thinking....ah, yes. Okay. Bottom knobs are for the tub. Top knobs are for the shower. There is only so much hot water so that if the bottom hot water knob is on, the upper hot knob will still create cold water. Turn OFF the tub hot water and voila - boiling water from the shower head. If you're confused then I have proved my point. Shower systems in the United Kingdom are absurd. One handle would suffice; turn it to the left for hot, turn to the right for cold. Easy. Simple. Why physically and mentally scar your tourists with inane systems?
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