Domestic

Two recent pictures taken at the IWCRP headquarters in San Telmo. One master WC and one for guests and/ or emergencies.

Hotel Hilton, Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires

The Hilton, named after slutty white trash Paris Hilton, has installed private WC-facilities in every room. IWCRP gives you two pictures from a room on the 5th floor, and one from room 747 on the 7th floor. Notice the cuadrangular seats, the telephone within reach and the double set of paper.

Orsara Café, Palermo, Buenos Aires

Jorge Luis Borges 1730. This WC has both a bidét and a shower. According to President Néstor Kirchner, guests some times confuse the applications, causing distress amongst the cleaning-persons.

El Trapiche, Palermo, Buenos Aires

El Trapiche has huge, delicious steaks, practically for free. In other words, a typical argentinian restaurant. The adress is Paraguay 5099.

Blanco Lobo Bus Station, San José

IWCRP partner La Nación gives us this picture today, from the San José-Puerto Jiménes Bus Station.

One of the travellers, Johanna Acevedo, who helped her mother getting on the bus, states that the toilets are disgusting, and they charge 100 colones for a short visit. Furthermore, one runs the risk of being robbed before getting on the bus.

Alternative use 2

IWCRP has previously discussed whether or not to shit where you eat, and the pros and cons regarding drinking where someone else has shitten. As it turns out, this message from our Corporate Responsability Program has not been transmitted to every corner of the world yet.

This video has one quite impressive example of how you should use a WC, and two very good examples of how not to. Click the picture to see video on Youtube.

Untertürkheim, San Telmo

Finally, the IWCRP has emptied its archive and made it public. From now on, and starting this very moment, only fresh pictures will be posted.

Today´s picture is, believe it or not, from a bar. A good one, too. Untertürkheim, located at the corner of Tacuarí and Humberto Primo in San Telmo, is probably the best place to have a beer in Buenos Aires.

More than 40 different beers can and must be had, most of them German (including Erdinger, thank the Lord) and Argentinian microbrews, which are surprisingly good. Quilmes, Brahma, Isenbeck and Schneider are all absent, which is a blessing for those of us who actually like good beer.

Gran Hotel Dora, Córdoba

Next to this WC there was a bathtub and FREE shampoo and conditioner. Just in front of it, there is a window where one may dry one´s socks and / or watch the nearby tourist attractions.

This is the only picture we have from our investigatory field trip to Córdoba, so take a long, good look at it.

The unknown

Another anonymous urinal. IWCRP will give a US$ 30.000 reward for any information which contributes to resolve the mystery of its whereabouts.

Colón & Rosario Multiuse Collection

Another collection. In the early years of the International WC Research Project, methodology was not entirely appropiate. Therefore, our database has millions of pictures without reliable information regarding WC location.

However, picture 1 is from a coffee shop in Rosario, picture 4 is from the public facilities in the park in Colón, pictures 5 & 6 are from hotels in Colón, and the last one is from a wonderful little bar where one of the other clients tried to sell us a large painting, allegedly one of great value, painted by one of the great british painters.

He went to his house and brought the art for us to see, and it turned out to be a picture of several little chickens and their mother (could be their aunt or older sister as well), painted in (slightly) different shades of brown. Apparently, it could be sold in Europe for thousands of euros.

We saved the money, and took the picture which can be seen below instead. Now that is art.

Colón & Rosario Urinal Collection

From a trip to Colón by the Rio Uruguay, and Rosario, the third biggest city in Argentina with 1,121,441 inhabitants, by the Rio Paraná.

Colón is a nice little town with a river to swim in and termal water to boil in, and it attracts a lot of tourists in summer. They´re building new houses all over the place, and about half of the ones that are finished, have "for rent"-signs on them.

Rosario was also a pleasant surprise for the IWRCP delegation; it´s one of these places that don´t really have any good tourist attraction, apart from the city as a whole. It just has a good feeling to it. And it has Hotel Savoy, finest hotel any IWCRP employee has ever stayed in.

El Gaucho, San Telmo

Amidst fancy bars in the area around the corner of Chile and Defensa, this little parrilla is like an oasis of unpretensiousness. Cheap, big bottles of Quilmes and carbonized meat served by elderly gentlemen. No doubt the best option for a quick litre of Quilmes in the area.

The picture is from the ladies' room; thanks to my mother for valuable research.

Coffee, Cross Stitching & China

Since IWCRP went public one month ago, this page has been visited by more than 200 people. We have a web tracker which shows us where in the world these people are, and so far we´ve had visits from Argentina, USA, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, China, New Zealand, Norway, France, Spain, Japan, Iceland, Colombia, South Africa, Brazil, Germany, Singapore, Chile, Russia and Costa Rica.

It appears to be particularly popular amongst americans and canadians, and we´ve been getting a lot of hits thanks to a link on another blog; coffe cup thoughts. It appears to be a blog about stitching and knitting, and the link comes with a warning. Commentaries on the post discuss brazilian porn, as is to be expected on any blog about stitching, but my favourite is the one by a woman who lists her interests as "cross stitch, knitting, church and swimming". She is the author of the blog "quietly stitching", yet she labels IWCRP as "totally bizarre".

Also, we keep getting hits from people who google "Buenos Aires" and other places mentioned here, but the most interesting thing is that lately, we´ve recieved a wave of chinese people; Liaoning, Shandong, Sichuan, Hunan, Fujian and Hubei are just a few of the places they come from. As opposed to most of our visitors, it does not appear that they visit us by accident, as their visits are logged "without referring link"; i.e. not from the random button nor any search engine. It appears that they write the URL in the adress bar, in an active and concious way. Or there´s some logical explanation to it, but I prefer to believe that IWCRP is the new rice in the fastest growing economy in the world.

As most of you allready know, the chinese were the first to invent the WC, but as usual, it was reinvented and taken credit for by a european a couple of milleniums later. In this case, it was Thomas Crapper (sic!) who took the honour. Apparently, archeologists found an object which could not have been used for anything else in the grave of some chinese person of the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC to 24 AD).

That´s probably the origin of our chinese friends´interest, then. Anyway, in order to please approximately 1.300.000.000 people, here´s a vast collection of chinese toilets, thanks to google and frightened tourists.

Café Irazú, Montevideo

Café Irazu is named after the 3.432 m costa rican volcano which last erupted when John F. Kennedy came to visit in 1963. The Irazú, named after an indian tribe that used to live nearby, helps the people of Cartago determining which way is north. Very convenient, since costa rican streets do not have names, nor the houses numbers, so adresses are like "200 m north, 800 west and 75 north of where the chinese restaurant used to be before the health inspector turned up".

This coffee shop in Montevideo does have an adress, though; it´s Juan Carlos Gómez 1315, and the costa rican coffee is excellent. And as always, it provides photo opportunities for the Project when the "eruption" comes 5 minutes later.

Since I´m a nice guy, I give you a picture of the Irazú crater as well.

El Molino, Cabo Polonio, Uruguay

Cabo Polonio is a strange, yet very nice little town on the beach. Surrounded by several kilometers of sand dunes, without any cars except a few 4wd trucks which bring visitors to or from the bus stop. No electricity, no phone, no water in the little houses scattered randomly about the place.

El Molino, however, has a WC, or a C, to be accurate. In order to protect the audience, the angle of this picture does not allow us a view of the more profound part of the bowl, where several previous guests had contributed to a rather disturbing panorama.

Maybe I´m getting a little soft, perhaps I give you too many unrelated pictures, but here are a few from the rest of Cabo Polonio. It wouldn´t surprise me if someone, maybe a cow, a horse or at least a chicken, has used the beach or the corner of one of the little houses as a WC, so that justifies it.

Choriburger, Abasto, Buenos Aires

Choriburger is located right across the street from the mall in Abasto. There are several pooltables, extremely cheap beer and perhaps the finest toilets in town. According to unreliable sources, the place is full of peruvians with knives.

The brownish yellow on picture 1 is not mine; looks peruvian.