Water, Water everywhere

Those Who Know These Things told me that I shouldn’t really drink the tap water in Taipei, and sure enough the hotel room was outfitted with multiple bottles of water (free, not the normal 2000% markup), including one in the bathroom for teeth brushing. So I dutifully stuck to bottles, though I’m pretty sure that one or more of the restaurants we hit over the course of the week were serving tap water, so who knows. My point in mentioning this is that it seems odd to me that we fix the “undrinkable tap water” problem by moving plastic bottles around instead of improving the standards of the water supply. But maybe it’s more of a precaution for tourists who don’t have the same gut bacteria and immunity living in Taipei would provide, rather than the fact that the water is actually risky to drink. Either way, bottled water generally seems like a waste to me.

Somewhat related, most of the places I went in Japan and Taipei have automatically flushing urinals. This isn’t surprising in and of itself, they’re becoming more and more common, especially now that retrofit kits are available. What’s strange is the flush logic I observed while in Asia. While most auto-flush toilets wait until you leave and then flush, these all did a short flush as soon as you step up to them, and then flush as normal once you’re done. I have to assume that there is some sort of logic to that pre-flush, since they all did it, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why that might be, and it seems to be a waste of water.