Right. So. I love showers. I’ve been blogging weekly for almost four years without mentioning this, which represents remarkable restraint on my part. Maybe I’ve just been choosing my moment.
This is my moment.
This is the story of the greatest shower of my life.
I hasten to clarify that I mean that in both senses: my personal best time taking a shower, and also the all-time most wonderful shower apparatus I’ve witnessed.
Now, I’m not rich. I’ve never flown first class. I don’t know how the one percent live. If you do, you may read the following with a big old PPPSSSSHAW. I can live with that.
But the way I’d really like to live is in this shower. All night long like Lionel Richie.
For the record, this shower was in the bathroom of my hotel room at the Petit Palace Museum in Barcelona. Yes, it’s called a Museum, yet it’s a hotel. And I just randomly booked it because it was cheap. It’s not like I’d read yelp reviews about the shower. (Can you sort yelp or tripadvisor reviews by shower? You should be able to, dammit.) My point is, the Petit Palace Museum isn’t the Hilton. To tell you the truth, I avoid Hiltons because I figure Paris Hilton doesn’t need my money. And I don’t know that any Hilton has a shower like this one.
When I first walked into the bathroom, I wasn’t particularly impressed. I’ve been more blown away by the look of other showers. Kids, y’all better believe those advice-givers when they tell you looks aren’t everything.
Just to get this out of the way: the floor was one of those stiff-bumpy ones designed for maximum barefoot traction. The floor was slightly tapered downward to the drain, which consistently drained instantly. Quite a nice change from my previous hotel in Alicante (which was a hotel with a golf course!), where the water clogged the drain and, within minutes, forced the shower-user’s feet into a basin of their own filth.
This shower at Petit Palace Museum in Barcelona had a ginormous upper head the size of a dinner plate. Probably running streams from about 150 holes.
Second it had a hose-nozzle thing, like a giant’s toothbrush attached to a hose. It’s a standard feature, but this one had serious kick.
Thirdly, it had horizontal jets. Yes, horizontal jets. Not the hose-nozzle, but six jets on the side, carefully landscaped for maximum effect. My photo doesn’t do their power justice, because I didn’t want to make my camera-phone wet, but when turned up to the max, these guys smash their water against the opposing wall.
Fourthly, there’s what I’ll call a mode dial, where users can toggle between the three types of shower. No, I didn’t find a way to have all three modes at once. But after a few minutes, I thought of something even better.
I carefully placed the hose-nozzle down on the shower floor. You do recall me praising its kick? I pointed the floor-resting head straight up and worried that the recoil would throw the thing around the basin like a slithering snake. But no…the engineers might well have anticipated this use, because the water sprouted solidly for at least a meter while the head stayed steady.
You see where this is going, don’t you, fellow shower-lovers? Toggling time. Turning the dial. From the top. To the side. To the bottom. To the top again. To the bottom again. To the side again. Back. Forth.
I know what you’re wondering. Can you set the toggle halfway between one of the modes? So that you get about half of one and half of the other?
Reader: you can.
Top. Side. Topside. Bottom. Side. Bottom side. Topbottom. I could have been in there for an hour. Set up shop like Kramer on Seinfeld.
There are days when it feels like we’ve squandered the future, failed to live up to the hopes and blessings of previous generations. Our carbon emissions are turning the world into a permanent sauna. We still haven’t sorted flying cars, moving sidewalks, hover boards, space travel, or artificial intelligence. War, famine, disease, pestilence, slavery, racism, sexism: these remain greater problems in 2017 than many had anticipated.
And yes, I know that one problem with recent decades of technological innovation is that we’ve chosen to focus on the personal and “indivuated,” instead of the world-changing. Yeah, I know all that.
But this shower. THIS shower. My God. Our Greco-Roman ancestors would be thrilled with our level of innovation. We got this much right, at least. We got it RIGHT.
Everyone should have one.