Being a Parisian for many years now, I'm quite familiar with the Capital's ways and also the lovable or weird things it hosts and for they're not to be seen or meet anywhere else on the blue planet, attract every year, thousands of people  from the known universe and far beyond.
    1987 was a great year, and myself, still a child, not already a teenager, was living in a suburb, thirty kilometers south from Paris. To take the train and go for a walk in the City of Lights was then the most incredible and  desirable  adventure for a young boy.  In thoses times,  thirty kilometers from Paris meant, the countryside, corn fields, rabbits under the moon light, hours of delight in spaces without limits, barriers or frontiers. I lived in an open world, on another world.
    So naturally, getting inside the walls of Paris was something a lad took much pleasure in.
    On one of those days, my mother took me to the Louvre museum, and  after she told me about wonderful pictures or sculptures, we went in a Brasserie, a French coffee-shop, where you can have a meal, or more often a drink or some sweets. We were in for an ice cream with some Chantilly mountain.
    Sitten outside at a table, watching the street in the sounds of the boulevard, we enjoyed the Italian ice cream behind our sunglasses full of sunrays. And, as Mom was talking with me, I saw it on the other side of the boulevard. It looked like a rectangle box, chocolate brown, with a silverish door, and upon it something I could not clearly see. "What is that thing over there?!" I wondered. I didn't ask Mom immediately for I was to discover myself.
    Then happened the scene, the primary scene I was never to forget. A man in suit caring his black suitcase, quite in a hurry and apparently quite upset, sped his walk to the chocolate box.  With his right hand , he searched inside his pocket and after he introduced something in a hole, the silverish door opened. And as smoothy as it had opened, after a few minutes, I could not help from looking at it, and I was not listening to anything Mommy was telling me,  as smoothy, it opened. And there, from where I was, twenty-thirty meters, I could immediately see the change on the face of the man. His clothes were the same, but his face seemed suddenly calm, his cheeks, a bit red, his front head a bit wet, and in his eyes, the glitter of a great satisfaction. What then? The man felt someone was peeping at him. Slowly, he looked around, and it took him no longer than five seconds to get into the little eye's of the boy on a chair, on the other side of the boulevard. Simply, he smiled at me, gave me a sign with his left hand and walked away with his suitcase.
    Man, I had no words for it, but an obsessive thought.
    "Mum", I asked, "What's up there, in the chocolate box?"
    My mother immediately laughed and had to drink her water glass to ease the biscuit she's swallowed go down her throat.  "This, honey, is a water-closet, some kind of automatic cab, that washes itself every time someone went in."
    "Mum, I'd like to go the toilets."
    "Yes honey, just walk inside the bar and tell the man you wanna go to the phone cab, it's just there on the right side."
    How could I tell her, I was not in a hurry, and my wish then was to cross the street and go there.
    "Mum, I thought , I could go there..."
    "My boy, why should we spend two francs to go there when you can just go inside. Please go in."
    Disappointed, I walked in, asked the man in black and white suit for the phone cab and he answered me. "U need to wash your hands, my boy? It's up there."
    So , my hands I washed and watered my hair like the man on the other side, but I still was disappointed.
    We went home, and the first thing  I did was to draw the cab in one of my drawing books, with some indications about the cab and what I imagined the inner mechanism was.
    The next time we went for a day walk in Paris, I did my best to get inside one of the cabs making my mother unpleased with me. "Why didn't you go when we were in restaurant?"
    Of course, she didn't understand. 
    One after another, I learned it was made of some concrete, one meter and a half width, for three meters and a half long. The smooth door was made of some aluminum, the seat of French porcelain, some kaolin, this was told by a specialist of  la Madeleine store.
    But still I could not see the inside mechanism of the cab, I was just getting inside the left side.
    Then going to study in La Sorbonne, I could go everyday to any of them but more important, have a seat in a park and take a look at it anytime I wished.
    Finaly,  I  became a Parisian, and by the year 2007 it was decided by the Mayor that the toilet cabs would now be free, and that anybody in a hurry could decently go inside instead of showering the wall with their golden water or letting some awful brown mine in some obscure places where people won't miss walking in with their sandals, or some children, still learning how to walk, with their palms.
    Sometimes, the door opens on the outside world, and the light of the sun flashes in, like a spaceship sas opening on the day of another sunny planet, and at this hour, I never miss to smile and show my brightest face, for there maybe some little alien boy peeping from anywhere.