Pay to pee and out-wording the Inuit again

A few more minutiae of long distance driving in Germany. The most annoying thing about freeway service areas?

They make you pay to go pee.

The captive audience take on taking a leak. 50 Euro cents to go to the bathroom.
You get a 50 cents coupon if you pay with 1 Euro, redeemable at the food counter or the convenience store. The coupons are state of the art with more security features than the American 1 Dollar bill.

Buying and maintaining the machines to grant you access to the bathroom and the coupon processing machines at the cash registers ain't cheap.

For a family of four with two really low capacity bladders and digestive tracts it gets expensive to go from A to B and to go in-between.

Take the regular rest areas instead. The bathrooms there are still free.

And you don't have to spend even more money on candy that costs three or four times as much as at the grocery store to redeem those coupons. Or on Iron Cross LED lights.

And the freeways are still toll free for cars. So enjoy while it lasts.

But do stop at one or two service areas to savor the multi ethnic society of the country.
If you hit one of the few remaining German fast food stops, you can treat yourself to sausage with fries, cabbage rolls with mashed potatoes, schnitzel with fries and other old time goodies.

The 1950s neon signs and green and pink interior decorations are gorgeous. So different from the majority of all the Burger King or Mac Donald's joints.

Expect the food counter folks to be a mix of German Germans, Turkish and other Middle Easterners, expect Spanish or Italian cashiers, the odd Indian cook and the Polish or Russian gas station attendant.

Germans not only have as many words for snow as the Inuit as argued in the post "20 shades of snow", they easily out-word any other nation in the number of words for trash.

"Reiseabfälle" in big black type on freeway rest areas is our current fave example. "Travel trash", not just any garbage, not trash you bring from home, not trash resulting from any activity other than traveling?

Now, if you find yourself in front of such a container, clenching the chocolate bar wrapper from that bar you brought from home - how do you proceed without being cited and fined?

Just stick it in there. You can always clarify that the word "only" (German "nur") is missing, so, if they really did not want that wrapper to be placed in the travel trash can, you insist that the label would need to be more specific.