Europeans Don't Drink Enough

By which I mean, that they drink drink plenty, but they have evidently evolved beyond (or not yet to?) a need for simple water.

I have no idea how they survive - really, I don't.  Anyone would think they would dry up and blow away.  Everyone from the restaurants to my well-meaning host family sets the table with tiny, short little glasses.  Menus offer beer and wine by the page, or at least the paragraph, sodas in a small list in the corner, and anything not carbonated is demoted to the leftover lines below the soda list.  There is no such thing as free water, let alone free refills of any drink.  Even if you order a soda, you get one rather slender, modestly-sized glass, which is apparently intended to last you the whole meal.

At dinner here, my host-parents usually drink wine.  I am always offered some, but if I take any, I feel bad, because they can make a three-and-a-half inch tall glass last for forty-five minutes, and, when it's the only thing I've been given to drink, I just can't.  So, I've taken to drinking water, which they handily place on the table in a large glass pitcher.  I feel it is less evident if a person glugs three or four glasses of water than if they do the same of wine.  I'm certain I notice the difference...

But even the nicest restaurants our program provider has payed for suffer from the same mysterious assumption that human hydration is a marginal need.  Ask for a glass of water to accompany your wine, and you get a fancy, minuscule glass bottle of mineral water.  It's no wonder they charge for the stuff, when they insist on serving it that way, I suppose.  But, you only get one.  Your fee only payed for two drinks each, and you just used it in a vain attempt to slake your thirst on not quite enough liquid to drown a mouse.

Also, did you know they will carbonate iced tea, over here?  They do!  Sitting in a little Italian pizzeria on Sunday, I saw "Ice-Tea" crammed in the corner, and I practically lept for joy.  Thank heavens!  A Southern girl saved!  Nectar of life, once again on a menu.  It arrived in a singularly large glass, for Belgium, and I was quite halfway through swallowing before I realized that it was...fizzy.  I despise most bubbling liquids.  And of all things, tea?  I'm not saying they're crazy, or anything, but, seriously?

Well, that's alright, I thought.  I'll just ask for wa... oh.  Right.

The restaurants mostly serve coffee after dessert, but that's not peculiarly thirst-quenching.  I also have yet to observe a European dragging a massive, reusable water bottle around, which, while mystifying, does have the pleasant effect of meaning that there are somewhat fewer to trip over in the classroom aisles.  But it all dos leave me wondering if they ever drink enough to support the mouse that we were intent on drowning earlier.  What must Belgian mice drink - a raindrop a day?  Goodness knows they could get at least one every hour, if they took a notion to.

Of course, if they continue to keep me in splendid desserts over here, I won't be complaining too loudly about much of anything...

Such are the vagaries of foreign life.