The writings of Mark J. Lehman

Something that has peeved me quite a bit, particularly during my travels around Germany, is the lack of drinking fountains. Bus stations, train stations, public parks, museums, really anywhere that sees a decent amount of foot traffic in the US has a drinking fountain. Here, well, that's not quite the case. You can't find a drinking fountain here to save your life. I'm not being figurative: if you were dying of thirst, I'd give 5 to 1 odds that you would die before you found a water fountain.

By my reckoning, there are a couple reasons for this. First off, many of these buildings and parks were built a long, long time ago, and either nobody thought to improve them by putting in drinking fountains (doubtful) or nobody wanted to spend the money. The second reason is not far from the first; it's likely that since they covet water so much here, and since they frown on people ordering tap water at restaurants, they don't want to spend money to give people free water and they'd be disgusted by those who drink water from the tap anyway.

The basic premise of this post is that as horrible as some American infrastructure is (take a look at a highway map of LA for an example), there are a lot of good things we've got going back in the old U. S. of A. And one of my favorites is the plenitude of fresh, free water.

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