Comments on: Trip part 4: Berlin

By: rafdan

rafdan — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 07:32:23 +0000

By the way this wall at the Mauerpark is not the Berlin Wall, the frontier line was in front of the Mauerpark. and is not existing anymore. Its just a wall sprayed with Grafitti.
Greetings from Berlin

By: Water in Europe | The Changelog

Water in Europe | The Changelog — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 01:30:43 +0000

[...] was a bit surprised when I took a shower at our hotel in Berlin. Although that hotel was extremely environmentally-conscious in every other way — including [...]

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 12:57:00 +0000

Yep, I’ve had no qualms about drinking the tap water. It was the difficulty of doing so that was surprising ;-) I’ll be posting more on this in a bit.

By: Carsten

Carsten — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 10:47:28 +0000

True, on the one hand I really like the fountains in the US, except for the first time where I made a fool out of myself trying to drink – a very wet fool afterwards (given the fountain was partially broken, but nevertheless).

Apart from that, I really like your diary, especially seeing places again where one lived nearby or visited through a “foreign” pair of eyes!

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 16:08:32 +0000

That’s exactly what we wound up doing. And we’ve got a similar situation in the USA, but in general you don’t need to carry around a bottle in a city here because there are plenty of drinking fountains.

By: Cùran

Cùran — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 14:06:00 +0000

The German word for “ticket” for a ride with e.g. a bus is “Fahrkarte” (IPA: ['faːɐ̯kaʁtə]), if you want a ticket for something like a cinema or a museum you ask for a “Eintrittskarte” (IPA: ['aɪ̯ntʀɪʦkaʁtə]), though “Billett” or “Ticket” are also widely used synonyms, so the “Ticket” is nothing which gives you away (damn Anglicisms ;-) ).

About the water fountains: many Germans just take a bottle of water (often something refillable as the Sigg () bottles or a glass bottle (which are still quite common)) or something else to drink with them, if they’re “on tour”. So most people just don’t have the need for a water fountain. And as Carsten pointed out, the water you get from a tap conforms to the standards set forth in “Council Directive 98/83/EC of 3 November 1998 on the quality of water intended for human consumption” (). That means unless you see a sign next to the tap saying you shouldn’t drink from it (you might have noticed them in the toilets on the ICE), you can.

Cheers,
Cùran

By: Michael Banck

Michael Banck — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 12:35:45 +0000

Also, most germans prefer to drink sparkling water for some reason.

By: Carsten

Carsten — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 10:16:11 +0000

Hi John,

the lack of drinking fountains is possibly related to the fact that you can drink the water from (almost) any tap here – in fact the water you’ll get from the tap has to pass tests which are about as strict as the cheapest bottled water. So just take an empty bottle and refill it anywhere :)