Being from Alabama, I'm kinda used to the idea that when you walk into a regular local restaurant (non-franchise)....that some waitress brings out a glass of ice water....free of charge. The water of course....is local city-water....not from some French glacier or costing you 1.80 Euro.
Typically, in Germany....especially in the summer, you might see fifty-percent of folks order a small bottle of water for the table and share out glass of commercial water. The idea of tap water? I don't think there's a chance that you can find such a thing in Germany.
So, it came up recently as an EU discussion topic....because the EU is so dedicated to fixing 'broke things'. Most BREXIT would interrupt the conversation at this point, and suggest this is why they got so anti-EU. But that's the pure nature of the EU today....nothing can stand unaltered.
The EU would like to fix the table water 'problem'. So there's this Drinking Water Directive being talked about.
Someone did the statistical analysis and said that roughly 80 percent of all Europeans have a trust problem with drinking tap water. The ARD (public TV in Germany, Channel One) says this. I tend to agree, there is this perception of tap water being untrusted.
Some PhD folks in the EU did the analysis and says the actual real true risk of potential health hazards rests at about four percent. Why four-percent? Some countries are lax....some allow for issues to exist. So NOT ALL water in the EU is the same. Rather shocking but it's been that way since the Roman days when water consumption and movement was a big deal. The EU says they can write up a regulation to set limits on issues and pollutants, and fix this whole mess.
Then this EU logic would kick in....if you had pure tap water everywhere....you wouldn't need to order water at the restaurant. The fact that French Evian glacier water is awful dang tasty? Or that Sachsen Quelle stille water is really tasty? That concept hasn't really occurred with the EU folks.
At this point in the story....I wanted to ask the EU folks if they sipped water from the Brussels water supply but I kinda doubt that they do....and that they also buy French or German bottled water.
The EU then came up with this study, which they don't discuss much over who they asked or how they phrased the questions....but they think if water quality was better, then plastic bottles of water would decrease by 17-percent, and you could start a trend.
Somewhere in this mix is this new EU initiative called "Water is a Human Right". If you just had clean water, your life would be better.
I live off in some valley in central Germany where the local mountainside has a spring that runs down into a small city building....which filters the water, and then feeds it into a big tank. While I am awful partial about drinking French Evian bottled water (it's been that way for over 15 years)....I can readily drink my German town's water with a couple of ice cubes, and think it's pretty tasty and safe. Naturally, I refer to it often as 'almost glacier water'.....just ten thousand years ago, some glacier sat over the top of the valley.
Where is all of this leading onto? Well....I would suspect in five years that when they hit 99-percent safe water across all of the EU....some regulation will come to exist which says you (the restaurant or cafe or bar) MUST offer free tap water if asked. If you sit and ponder upon this whole thing....for the 1.80 Euro for that small bottle of water....the restaurant or bar is probably making a minimum of 20 cents off that sale. In an entire year, if you took up the whole profit margin of an average restaurant, all of this bottled water sales probably amount to 1-percent of the total profits. It's not much, but in a business where every single cent matters....it's something.
As for the EU? It's simply another brick in the wall over their need to fix just about everything possible, and proving the BREXIT argument once again.
The odds of me ever ordering some tap water at some German restaurant? Even if free? Maybe if I've had five or six German beers and gotten fairly drunk....I might accidentally ask for some tap water by accident, but that's about the only way that I'd order tap water.
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