Sean

Adding the non-regulatory half, because plenty of outside switches are not driven by the rules at all.

Bathrooms are the smallest room in most houses, and by the time you have fitted a door that swings inward, a basin, a towel rail and a mirror, the wall area next to the door on the inside is often already taken or blocked by the open door itself. The wall on the other side of the same doorway is usually empty.

There is also a genuine convenience argument that people forget once they are used to it going the other way: you light the room before you walk into it, rather than groping along a wall in the dark. Hotels that light the bathroom automatically are solving the same problem with a sensor.

So: regulation explains why it is common in some countries, geometry explains why it survives even where it is not required.

One more that is worth saying because it sounds like a workaround and is actually the fix: a syndet or liquid cleanser rather than a true soap bar behaves the same in both water types.

Traditional soap is the thing that reacts with hardness minerals. Detergent-based cleansers do not, so they lather consistently, rinse consistently and leave no scum anywhere. If you move between water types often, that single swap removes the whole problem in both directions.

The argument made in favour of the text version, which I heard often in the trade, is that words are precise in a way symbols are not.

A symbol has to be learned and it can only express so much. "No turn on red" is a conditional rule about a specific manoeuvre in a specific signal state, and there is no obvious picture for it. American signage leans on wording partly because the underlying rules are more conditional — regulations vary by state and by intersection, and text scales to that in a way a fixed symbol set does not.

The counter-argument is exactly what you noticed: reading takes longer than recognising, and at speed that gap is the whole safety question. The compromise you see in practice is that the shape and colour do the fast work — an octagon means stop before you have read anything, a yellow diamond means warning — and the words carry the detail.

That is a fair hit. The end-of-restrictions sign is genuinely opaque, and I have watched experienced drivers argue about it.

Practical filter for the pod-style hostels, learned the hard way: check whether the pods have doors or curtains, and whether the place has a bar.

A solid door plus no on-site bar is the combination that gets you the capsule experience — quiet, anonymous, sleep-focused. Curtain plus bar is a dorm with better marketing, and you will be awake at two in the morning.

One caution on authenticity as a goal: even careful reconstructions are working with modern ingredients.

The wheat, the meat, the fruit and especially the vegetables have all been bred substantially since then, and the fuel and the pots were different too. So the best available version is a well-informed approximation rather than the real thing, and the good practitioners say so.

That is not a reason not to seek it out. It is a reason to be sceptical of anyone claiming exactness.