Berkeley II

The Faculty Club has unisex bathrooms. Three shower stalls, two with glass doors, none with locks. Three toilets. Three sinks. And a urinal.

There's a level of discomfort with the unisexness. We laugh when a Guatemalan woman says she looks up while brushing her teeth to find two African guys brushing on either side of her. These are great guys. But I don't want to be in a bathroom with them or any of the other men here for that matter. They're colleagues. It's too weird.

A Canadian described inching her clothes off in the shower stall, only have the water "hurtle" to the other side, soaking her jeans. Nothing like tugging on wet jeans in the morning. Towels slung over shower doors. People getting up very, very early to play the odds against seeing anyone else in the bathroom, only to find everyone had the same idea.

At dinner, there are a lot of laughs. There's a certain level of oneupsmanship that comes to play when world travelers tell stories. The bathrooms here spurned on the stories of other bathrooms. No bathrooms are topped by odd bathrooms. A Nigerian man tells about a hotel bathroom in Mali that had a half curtain, hanging from the top of the door. He rigged up a sheet, since the bathroom door was in full view of the room door. And we laughed. When a New Zealand woman told about being on a boat and being told to go in a hole that was hovering above baby crocodiles, the whole conversation had spiraled to its pinnacle. And after that, the stories ceased.

I like sitting at meetings with creative people from all over the world. From Kenya and Peru, the UK and Australia, India, Guatemala and Nigeria, the Netherlands. It's stimulating, enlightening, and real.