For all its charm and grandeur, there are a couple of very simple modern conveniences that have apparently never caught on in most of Europe, for some bizarre reason: 1. High chairs. Even though the continent is facing a looming economic crisis due to declining birth rates, families with small children are evidently not welcome in European restaurants, which seem to have never even heard of a high chair. 2. Enclosed showers. Almost every European hotel I've been to has a bathroom with a shower that lacks an enclosure or curtain. One even had a shower dangling from the main ceiling right in the middle of the bathroom, just over the floor drain. It was impossible to take a shower without completely soaking the everything in the bathroom, including the toilet paper that couldn't be removed from the dispenser. Even worse, another place didn't even slope the floor to the center floor drain, so water ran out under the bathroom door and soaked the entire hotel room floor. It would be hard to deliberately design something more idiotic!
Hmmm I think that you have just been unlucky.... most restaurants in the UK have highchairs, although you usually have to ask for them. A lot of my friends who go to mainland Europe on a regular basis comment on how much more accepted children are in restaurants than in the UK...this may of course not include the provision of high chairs! showers..all the hotels I have stayed in in the UK have shower enclosures....the hotel without the sloping floor does sound most unfortunate, you'd think repeated water damage would make them do something about it But then these little differences are what makes travel charming ( if sometimes inconvenient)...if Europe was as full of highchairs and perfect showers as the states...well you might not realise you had been on holiday
It is usually not a problem to ge a high chair in a restaurant. You have to ask for them, but that should not be a problem right? and about the showers? I wonder in what crappy places you have been. I don't go in hotels often, but I have never ever seen one where everything would get soaked.
Hell, I stayed at a nice Best Western in La Jolla (spendy San Diego suburb) on Memorial Day weekend, and its shower had no door. I must be very unlucky! As for high chairs in Europe, now that I think about it, we only brought our 1-year-old out to dinner in my sister-in-law's hometown of Bergamo and with her husband's parents in Bologna. We didn't bring him with us in any other cities we visited, so maybe the problem is confined to northern Italy.
