>>>>>>>It actually took me a minute to realize what Grady meant by "do a foot long floater every day"
>>>>>
>>>>>I was trying to figure out *where* you could produce such an impressive measured example- but then I remembered the American plumbing standards that presumably are shared by the Canadians. ;-) The Brit/Antipodean example would be as twisted as their sense of humor.
>>>>
>>>>You've been to N America. You've seen the size of their helpings cf us normal mortals.
>>>
>>>
>>>I still didn't get it.
>>
>>Everything in North America is 'oversized' including our plumbing to handle our oversized dung...
>
>Actually, my first cultural shock moment was the one time we entered a McD, which happened during the first dozen hours on this side of the puddle. It wasn't the overcomplicated menu, the smell of cheap edible oil (we were used to just sunflower or corn oil, other kinds were good for railway lanterns maybe), and other weird smells, nor the amount of ice they crammed into their oversized paper glasses for colored sugar water... one could see all that (sans aroma) on TV. It was the toilet. Not the size of the porcelain, that was also in the movies and more or less expected. It's the agoraphobia. The distances were just too much - I figure a regular American must become claustrophobic in most of the toilets in places I remember from back home, specially in old downtowns, where these were added as an afterthought, a century or three after the building was finished, so they were squeezed into any available space. Specially with the regulation which requires an anteroom - i.e. you can't enter straight into it, there has to be two doors between the hall and the porcelain, which makes for an interesting exercise in creative architecture... how to put all that in least space. You may have seen some of those (maybe not in Germany, but elsewhere...), now imagine the opposite shock.
>
>update/disclaimer: I used the word "toilet" for historical accuracy. It took two more days on this continent to realize that it was an illusion caused by fatigue (we were in our 23rd hour of travel). There are no toilets, only restrooms. Wish I knew that at the time - I was so tired.

There are many homes in the U.S. which had bathrooms put inside closets when plumbing was added. When I was young I hated having to go out to the outhouse on my cousins' farm in the middle of the night. Wisconsin in February can be very cold! My Uncle ran water into the hall closet and turned it into a bathroom one year. Now new homes have bathrooms almost as big as a bedroom!