The Norwegian boats/ferries in the fjords and for the coastal islands have free bathrooms. The Scandinavian boat/ferry terminals/ports for embarking and disembarking may or may not have free bathrooms.
Originally Posted by
milepig
I truly had a hard time finding a place to empty my bladder in Bergen. Every place I tried wanted you to touch our credit card (not swipe) and being an Amurrican, we tend to not have touch cards. I didn't try, but I might have been able to touch my iphone, but I was in no shape to spend time experimenting. No coins, just credit cards, and even the facilities in the tourist office weren't free. I finally resorted to buying a $6 cup of coffee in Starbucks that I didn't want, and that came with an access code printed on the receipt. The rest room in the large department stores also wanted payment.
What some people do at such places is wait for someone (who has paid for bathroom access or has a bathroom code) to use and exit the bathroom and then enter before the door closes. It works at Scandinavian fast food places and coffee shops. Also, most hotels have bathrooms in or near the lobby or other publicly accessible part of the hotel, and such hotels will often give the bathroom directions and any bathroom code/pass to most who ask. Shopping mall bathrooms in Scandinavia are usually free nowadays — and it’s been over a decade since I last encountered a Scandinavian shopping mall that had no free bathrooms for visitors.
For places that take contactless cards for payment, ApplePay mostly works but sometimes it works with some ApplePay-loaded US bank cards while not working with say some other ApplePay-loaded US bank cards. For example, ApplePay using my Amex Plat or Centurion cards wouldn’t work at some fast food places in France and Sweden, but if I switched the ApplePay selection to the Chase Sapphire Reserve it worked fine.