Public Urination (With A Catch) Now Legal In Copenhagen
If you’re ever in Copenhagen, sauntering back to your hotel room after a night of drinking when you suddenly realize you have to pee, go ahead and pull it out right where you stand. Public urination is now legal. Well, sort of.
When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go, and that’s apparently something that the city of Copenhagen understands well enough to make it legal to urinate outdoors as you please after a night of rowdy drinking.
Interestingly, public urination was legalized in Copenhagen to stop people from urinating in the city’s streets. The Copenhagen City Council came up with a relatively hygienic way to relieve yourself outdoors and made it legal.
The city has installed portable urinals shaped like giant, white plastic lilies across the densest part the city’s core last weekend. This is no joke. These lily urinals are basically funnels, which empty out into the city’s sewers.
“It’s something we developed for the Distortion music festival to create an easy, simple solution to an urban problem that can be set up and taken down easily,” city worker Claus Robl told the Politiken newspaper (via the English-language Copenhagen Post).
Robl heads up the Center for Renhold, the division of the city’s Technical and Environmental Department that is responsible for keeping the streets and other public areas of the city clean. They’re calling the lily urinal experiment a success.
“We did not get nearly as many complaints about people urinating on the walls of houses or on garden gates,” he said.
So if you’re visiting Denmark for the Distortion music festival, have a bit too much to drink, and don’t want to stand in line at the port-o-potty every time you need to break the seal, keep an eye out for something that looks kind of like this:
