Over the past 10-15 years, the road departments have installed a ton of roundabouts in northeastern Wisconsin, including in Green Bay, where I grew up (and where I still visit regularly); prior to then, roundabouts were essentially non-existent there. A lot of intersections which were four-way stops, or low-volume stoplights, are now roundabouts; many highway entrance/exits now also contain roundabouts.
If there was a PSA program to help drivers learn how to use them, it clearly wasn’t enough – every time I go up there, I see people who either don’t understand how to use them (i.e., always yield to traffic that’s already in the roundabout, never stop in the roundabout unless you have no choice, etc.), or just don’t care, and blow through them without caring about yielding.
Friend, given how downright nasty so many public squat toilets are here, I would definitely shy away from using any standing water provided for cleaning my hands or tush. And, yes, I live in China and I carry my own wet wipes, soap, and water bottle just in case I need to avail myself of the public loo.
Forgot to mention, many if not most public toilets here do not have a supply of toilet paper. It’s BYOTP.
One of the little things that people probably don’t think about much, but electrical switches work the other way around in Australia, NZ and the UK to the way they do in the UK - up is “off”, down is “on”.
Sorry, THOUGHT I had a reference, from Henry Petroski’s book The Evolution of Useful Things, but now I can’t find any statement like this. I will have to withdraw my claim that in Europe, forks have their decorations on the back side.
An indirect reference to decorations on the back side of the fork in France from Wikipedia:
The French style involves placing the forks tines pointing down on the table on the left hand side. This was done to show the coat of arms that was traditionally on that side contrary to Germany or the United-Kingdom.
Another thing, at least in NZ, is which side the cold control (knob or whatever) is on faucets. In the US, the cold is standardized to be on the right. NZ doesn’t have a standard, so it could be on either left or right.
That makes sense, even if one is not using a separate tap for each water temperature. In the US the two water lines usually combine into a single-handle tap. Lift and turn to the right, you get cold, and to the left, hot. Right in the middle is warm.
Would that this were an international standard. Hotels commonly have these taps on sinks and baths and as controls on showers. It seems to be entirely random which way they are installed.
In a recent hotel the sink went one way and the shower the other.
Yes, Hotels? They seem to go out of their way to install shower controls that defy logic or are inscrutable at first glance. I turn on - wait for some steam - go other direction if still cold - then settle into some reasonable compromise.
There’s an even older reason for cold-water taps to be on the right - it was not uncommon in old construction for a washbasin to be plumbed for ONLY cold water. So the single faucet handle was placed on the right side because the majority of people are right-handed. When hot water washbasins became common, the hot tap was placed on the remaining (left) side.
Old story: A bilingual hotel in Quebec has taps labelled “C” and “C”. The one is C for Cold, the other is C for Chaud.
Toilets in the US (at least) sit on a standardized flange on the floor and use a sacrificial wax ring to make a seal. It works, but it’s not the best system (IMO). In NZ the toilets use a rubber flange to seal against the outflow pipe, a much better system (the hardware clerk was very confused when I asked about a wax ring). BUT–it’s not standardized! Each toilet and each house is distinct! I burned a lot of gas going to the hardware store trying to install one toilet.
That was true of the Soviet Union’s civil airliners as well. Particularly the smaller planes like the Yak-40 were designed to operate out of unpaved airfields. And their first widebody, the Il-86, was designed to operate out of airports without any jet bridges, airstairs, or bag belts. Passengers could board via a set of built in stairs that led to the cargo hold, stow their own luggage, and climb another interior stairway up to the cabin.
There are versions of this for U.S. plumbing as well, and they’re as standardized as the wax ring, but are inexplicably unpopular. I’ve never seen a professional plumber use one in preference to a wax ring.
Examples (random picks from Google, no endorsement implied):
Can’t say I pay close attention to the design of various toilets, but that one, at least, I have absolutely seen in Germany. Possibly also in France, though I am not positive. It is not meant to be “weird” though; the idea there is somebody came up with a design that minimizes splash-back. It’s not for “inspecting” excreta.
Different sources point out different advantages and disadvantages of this toilet design. Most of the sources I’ve seen point to stool inspection as the primary “why” behind the design, but it would take a response from a designer of shelf-style toilets to really settle the matter.