I've been living in Australia over three years now and I still have not figured out the reasoning behind the water closet.
Of all the differences, this is the one that bothers me the most. I'm pretty okay with cars on the wrong side of the road, though it probably takes me longer to cross streets than natives. And I'm okay with the money, though I still think of the 5¢ and 10¢ pieces as nickels and dimes respectively AND the nickels are the size of dimes so it's doubly confusing! I've even found how to make decent substitutions for products that are readily available in the US like biscuit mix and bulk pork sausage (Google is a good thing!).
But I have not come to appreciate the water closet. It just seems like a waste of space to me. It would be so much more useful, and less wasteful, if it were a half-bath. I really do not understand the point of a room with nothing but a toilet in it. In my house, there's not even any room for storage, so the room literally has a tiny window close to ceiling level and a toilet. I really do not get it.
Three years later and it still baffles me. Perhaps I am far too influenced by Frank Gilbreth's time-and-motion study -- there are countless wasted motions necessitated by a water closet that would be eliminated by a half bath. Perhaps I'm hopelessly American in that way. Yeah, that's probably it.
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