privy redux

Having submitted ourselves to the sundry charms of the Japanese toilet on our first day in Taipei, it only seemed appropriate that M and I book-ended our short trip with a visit to the Taiwanese mecca of corpophagous fantasies.

Originally, both M and I had assumed that something as quirky as a toilet themed restaurant (its catchphrase: Go To Toilet!! Deliver Ur Shit) had to be a one-off. As it turned out, Modern Toilet was a successful franchise with branches all over Taiwan, the McDonald's for those comfy in the Freudian second phase, where in lieu of the Golden Arches you get its signature, gleaming bowl of simulacra crap. A place for reclaiming the shit-eating grin.

Somehow we both got it into our heads that this was going to be the pinnacle of sophisticated, naughty kitsch, a place overflowing with the Taiwanese version of early John Waters characters reveling in their own carnal excesses (a la Divine, that fecal-loving behemoth of a tranny...). A Rabeliasian rabble of the highest order. We were giddy all week just thinking about it while winding our way through Kaohsiung and Pingtung, Sun Moon Lake and Taichung. Ah, what strange gratification it was going be to cap off our last night with a swirly scoop of the restaurant's iconic chocolate ice cream delivered in a ceramic squat style toilet bowl. Maybe we'd even sample its shaved ice offerings of "bloody poop" (shaved ice with strawberry sauce) or "green dysentery" (with mung beans). Heehee, haha, we kept snickering and fantasizing to ourselves all week.

Perhaps we should have known that our visit to Modern Toilet would not live up to our hopes/hype when our Kaohsiung hosts, who turned out to be frequent diners at the branch in town, soberly described its attractions to us in terms of its reasonable prices, convenience and cleanliness. This was no ringing, John Waters kind of endorsement. More like lukewarm, Ron Howard fare or dare I say it (for you movie buffs), like a Brett-stinking-Ratner review of the positives of mass consumption.

Inside at the Ximending Taipei branch of the restaurant, M and I seemed to be the only ones making a carnivalesque spectacle out of our faux fecal matter. There we were playing with our food and hamming it up for our digital camera while next to us, a family of three was quietly and neatly finishing up their dinner. The mother gently nudged her plump bespectacled child to eat another bite of their family-sized dessert while the husband checked the text messages on his cell phone at the table. Forget that they were playing out this scene while sitting on closed toilet bowls instead of dining chairs and scooping tawny brown mush out of another giant toilet bowl on the table. It might as well have been any other family meal. Behind us, two twenty-something women were blankly taking sips of juice from miniature ceramic urinals while engrossed in hushed conversation with each other. The staff, with their generic polite shouts of welcome and brisk distribution of menus and orders, seemed equally immune to the unique charms of their surroundings. From the looks of all these people around us, we might as well have been in a TGI Fridays, Denny's or other generic chain restaurant. It all seemed so ho-hum to everyone but us. We were the freaks in our own freak show while everyone was just trying to have a decent, inexpensive meal. The very mundane nature of it all made it (and us) seemed even weirder.

Oh, and about the food: we ordered two small orders of ice cream (more like soft serve)---one chocolate, one chocolate and vanilla swirl. Flavor-wise both ice creams were on the watery and bland side, though the chocolate one did not disappoint visually. We didn't finish either toilet bowl of goop but we did manage to make a muck of the chocolate one to the point of grossing ourselves out before hightailing it back to our hotel. So without further adieu, for your scopic pleasure (especially you secret corpophages)...