I've never visited Europe and most travel guides don't cover the "water closet" situation in as much depth as you did. Thank you for the report!

Being female and married, I had to make mention of your comments on your wife's refusal to poop if you are in close proximity. That might not change. I've been married 9 years and I've still managed to remain a completely shameful shitter with my husband. SOme of us are just like that and even years and years spent with our dear ones will not bridge that gap. Do her a favour and just pretend you don't notice her bathroom habits. Congratulations on the marriage- may it be a long and happy one!

Thanks everyone; Married life is great, and Ty, I actually love my Mom in Law, I just know they get a bum rap a lot, so thought I'd' use that as a literary device...(there, now I'm covered if she happens to read this story...damn! Didn't mean to write that..better del

I just loved the explaination of the hypermassive blackhole toilet system. Scientific explainations like that are true classics.

Awesome tale, Dave J. Can you please explain the "Captain's Hat" part in detail? For some reason, I just don't get it.

Regarding your new wife's refusal to shit in the house while you are there: give it time, Dave! Most women are somewhat modest at first or don't know how far they can go with their husbands. New marriages are quite fragile and special and no woman wants to send her new husband running for air so early on in the marriage. I am happily married for 13 years and the level of intimacy I have with my husband is still evolving and growing, with plenty more adventures ahead, I suspect. As Justa Girl said, above, when your wife finally does go, don't make a big deal about it. As an aside, I'd like to mention that there are many 'personal grooming type things' I still don't do in front of my husband, and probably never will, but pooping isn't one of them!

Single and loving it, so I can't comment on the not shitting in front of your husband thing. However, my sister is not afraid of doing much in front of hers, including shitting.

On the subject of toilets I have also never been to Europe so I can only guess as to the strange mysteries of toiletdom. The weirdest toilets I've ever seen are on an Amtrak train. You shit in a metal pot and drop the lid. Suddenly this huge vacume erupts to life and sucks away your leavings.... Sometimes.
The other day I was taking the train to Florida and lifted the lid of one of these suckers and found a giant turd stuck to the metal bowl. It wasn't mine and it smelled horrid. I just dropped the lid and backed into another compartment, too afraid to check to see if it went down.
Another strange thing about the Amtrak toilets is that when they flush they make a sound like a crying baby. Sort of like when you blow away a poor, innocent little bunny. If you're ever on Amtrak try it sometime! You'll hear what I mean.

Congrats on the nuptuals Dave. I myself also just got married. I'm also 25. And I, too experienced a poopreport on my honeymoon aboard our cruiseline and I know what kind of dizzying nausea you're talking about. I haven't gotten around to writing my tale about it yet, but before long, it will find its way here.

Interesting piece on European (you're-a-peein') toiletries.

This should have been titled "European Defecation."

BTW. I'd like to see you try to stand up to your mother in law. You obviously haven't been married long!

Very informative report, Dave J. Good to see your outstanding prose on the site once again.

I can certainly relate to the inner ear predicament you described on your ship. Against my will, I was dragged to a three-day sales conference/cruise (which wasn't enjoyable by either definition) on a bottom-of-the-line boat which swayed every time a dolphin farted.

Not only did I get motion sickness, but I was swaying back and forth in the shower and on the crapper for at least a week after I got my land legs back at home. Lost my appetite and ten pounds in the bargain!

Thanks again for the international pooping facilities heads up!

I just spent three weeks in England, and they have the most powerful toilets I've ever seen. Of course, they'd have to with all the curries those people eat. I remember being kind of sick one night and taking a shit that probably would've filled the whole bowl back home, necessitating a half-hour of plunging, and when I flushed it, the bowl filled briefly, then everything was sucked down into the plumbing. I wish we had toilets like that here. The English are light-years ahead of us in their toilet technology.

American toilets suck!

On a Bicentennial concert tour to Europe (that’s 1976 to you kiddos), a few of us overdid it on the booze – a very few of us, namely me. I really sealed the deal by trying to climb a tree in London with no branches by repeatedly running up and flinging my body at it after having drunk WAY too many delicious Bombay gin and tonics. I kept falling straight off said tree onto my tailbone, which was, well, pulverized. Since I could no longer sit without pain, and we had many miles to travel, the doctor we had with us on tour prescribed large amounts of codeine, which I washed down with red wine, while continuing my pro-constipation diet of baguettes and cheese as we toured France. On a good day, with a high-fiber diet and plenty of hydration, codeine is constipating, but on my diet with no water or exercise, it was a buttbomb in the making. After two weeks of no shit, I was starting to feel a bit green, and my breath smelled like an old folks’ home. After consulting the same doctor, he suggested I might have fecal impaction, and that I should disimpact myself digitally. Yeah, dig it out of my ass with my fingers. Now mind you, we were staying in a catholic school that was out for the summer. It was a girls’ school, so it only had one bathroom, but it was this huge thing with 20 or so stalls. My friend, Tom, was also out sick that day with projectile diarrhea, so even though we were not that well acquainted, we shared a bathroom for many hours, he squirting and me digging. The turd bolus felt like it was the diameter of a salad plate (“…the baby’s head is crowning now…”), and my poor anus was stretched completely out, just accommodating it, when I added the insult of trying to insinuate my finger around the edge of this cylinder. No K-Y back then, and no Vaseline on hand (!). I think I ended up using my own ‘rrhoid blood for lube, just to get my fingers up my butt. Digging straight in yielded something resembling mini horse turds, which plinked loudly when flicked off my finger onto the bowl. Fecoliths. (I though you only saw those in the Museum of Natural History.) After hours of this torture, punctuated by useless eye-bulging and knee-wiggling straining in between, I had only excavated a couple of inches of King Butt’s tomb. The next day, the tour doctor called on a French pharmacy and presented me with an enormous hot-pink pill, which he described as some sort of ass-dynamite. I popped the pill and sang a concert while waiting for it to do its work. Up on the highest riser, I started to feel woozy near the end of the concert, and a slow, onerous writhe began in my poor paralyzed bowel. I thudded down to the stage behind the choir and ran for the nearest WC. The Frogs, God bless ‘em, have these bizarre-o platform toilets, where all your products can be displayed on the flat platform without being diluted or their fine odor diminished by the presence of water. I sat down and my asshole, by now a French cruller of ‘rrhoids, screamed as The Big One came out in a flood. Like a mudslide, a lava flow, like so much chili con carne, it came and kept coming, until the porcelain was heaped high with poo. I was swooning from the loss of it all, tears running down my cheeks as I swore to God I would NEVER let myself get constipated again.

As a Scotsman I found your comments on Scots crappers fair, but you really have to try a Dutch bog. They hae a wee shelf type thing for you to dump on so that you can inpsect your jobbie before you flush. This also leads to not only skid marks but the "Oh no! That'll never go with the first flush!" moment. You get used to it though.

In responce to Poop Doggy Dog, I have had a similar experence.
One day when I was taking a dump it wouldn't come out! I'm like "Man I gotta shit, but it's not comin out." So I'm stuck in the bathroom right before I have this hot date, and I'm like "Come on come on!", so I resorted to digging it out with a bunch of toilet paper. Man did that hurt. So I drive to my date's house (my ass still hurting for the shitt pulling experience) and while I'm on the road the rest of the shit that didn't come out in the toilet came out right in my car. I had to drive back to my house and cancle the date, and spent the rest of the day shitting on the toilet. Afterwards, I realized that I had been constipated, and promised myself to never be constipated agian! Has that ever happened to anyone else?

I was in austria and a little of germany for about a week and a half earlier this year. The toilets there are what my group and I lovingly refered to as 'Shelf toilets'. When you first look in the bowl, there's this flat shelf until the very front. At the front there's this drop with minimal water where everything eventually makes it way. Unless you sit at the very front of these things, you'll end up with your log on the shelf. Fear not however, there's a jet of water I'm sure similar to the power of a fire hose which shoots your stuff down the hole. And it was discovered that to leave it as clean as you (hopefully) found it, you'd better flush a couple times, the shelf likes to hold onto what ever it can. And don't forget the toilet paper which I'm sure was intended to be pink but is more likely to make you want to hurl, or just make you go all over again.

man, I really should read aaallll the comments, the Austrian Shelf Toilet sounds very much like the Dutch Bog the Scot talked about.