My 1925 house has this arrangement in the bathroom sink. I’ve gotten used to it. In the summer like now, the water flowing from the cold tap registers 84 degrees on my Thermapen thermometer.
In most places urinating against a church wall would be considered blasphemous. The St. Catherine Chuch in Brussels has a pissoir where you piss against the churches’ north wall. I very much try to do so every time I am near that church. That is the kind of recommendation I was thinking of. No picture, but cite.
BTW, in that very same church, during the pandemic:
Just the opposite in a hotel in Florence… once you got past the idea that the hotel was some business that bought only one floor of a multi-storey building (complete with beam-me-up tiny elevator) they’d installed modern toilets and a shower. There was no shower stall or curtain, or even a lip - the shower was the two feet or so beside the toilet. The whole room was tiled, but there was no provision to avoid spraying the toilet and the roll of toilet paper. I took it off the roller and put it up high. Also a bad design, the water seeped toward the doorway.
I think it was Neal Stepehenson who has a character contemplating that the same sort of tech and industry to produce it emerged in separate areas about the same time, so things we think of as “normal” would be their different design in those other countries, rather than direct copies of what we see.
In Australia, when you are finished with your shopping cart in the parking lot, you put it in the stall marked “trolley park”.
Unless you’ve got the one that jams.
That occurs in the US, too. More than once I’ve gone back and exchanged a cart with one wheel that didn’t swivel and/or turn freely.
Where did I say that?
The plumbing surprise I had in Ireland was that the drains for the bathroom were on the outside of the house, on the exterior wslk. That wouldn’t work where I live, with temps below 0 Celsius from November to April.
I’m old enough to remember two-faucet systems being common in the US, especially in public restrooms.
This is why Britons laugh when Americans use “bathroom” as a euphemism.
I’m Canadian and tend to use “washroom.” When I lived in the states that was as much a giveaway as the way I pronouced my "o"s was.
I remember seeing this on older buildings in London, too. Same idea as electrical wires being run in couduits mounted on the wall - simplest retrofit.
Specifically in the UK, mains cold water is (and was) generally drinkable as it was. Hot water traditionally came from a hot water storage cylinder (heated by an electric immersion element or an indirect heat exchanger coil fed by a gas or oil fired boiler) - to maintain the pressure of the hot water in the cylinder, there was usually a cold header tank above it in the roof space. Often this tank was not covered - so dust, dirt, invertebrates and sometimes birds and rodents could fall in there and die, but that was sort of OK because nobody drank the hot water - ‘you don’t drink the hot water because of this, but because you don’t drink the water, we don’t need to change this’, was the sort of rationale. I’m not going to defend any of that, but that’s what it was.
Many houses still have this configuration of plumbing. Mine does, in fact. The house is older than the plumbing, but the plumbing is also very old.
Mixer taps were originally not used because it was illegal to connect mains cold water to anything else, in case a drop in mains pressure caused the local (possibly contaminated) stored water to be siphoned back into the mains pipes. It still is illegal actually, but the problem is solved by check valves nowadays.
I hope you were joking here! 
Of course, my dog thinks the toilet is the absolute best place to get a fresh drink of water.
In 1970-71, I lived for a year in (a small suburb of) the town of Fribourg, Switzerland in a brand new building (in fact they were finishing the garage as we moved in) that had separate rooms for toilet and tub. The room with the toilet had a washstand, but cold water only. So even 50 years ago, they would have thought this reasonable. There was no shower.
Huh–this is actually almost true, except that he was visiting Moscow!
He was also clearly impressed with washing one’s hands in the flowing water as opposed to a full basin.
I can confirm this is standard, and I don’t think there is much possibility of freezing even in the coldest conditions. The residence time of waste water in the soil pipe is extremely short as it falls vertically down to below ground level to join the sewer line. And it regularly gets flushed out with warm drain water from the shower, bath or bathroom sink, which would effectively deal with any layer of ice starting to build up on the inside of the pipe.
It occurs to me though that the condensate line from the heat pump, which runs horizontally with a very slight fall before teeing into the soil pipe, may be at risk of freezing. Perhaps the same defrosting cycle that prevents the evaporator from freezing delivers warmish water to the condensate line.
This remark surprised me. Where I come from, it is leaving the taps running down an open drain that is considered to be wasteful of water (especially hot water).
Where I live, the sewer lines have to be below the frost line (+6 feet) to avoid having the sewer lines freeze. If we had outdoor drains, even if the waste water didn’t freeze in the drains on the outside of the house, the sewer lines would be above the frost line, so there would be freezing in the sewer lines, which then would cause back-ups of frozen waste in the outdoor drains.
I’m pretty certain that filling a basin uses more water. Similarly a shower uses less than a bath.
Depends on the shower. We put in a power shower and that thing drained the hot water tank in no time. Felt amazing though.