I have been meaning to write about this for sometime, but then I saw Paul beat me to the punch, from his recent writing on New Zealand:

Who the hell does this? separate hot and cold water taps? kai and i have seen this phenomenon _everywhere_ in new zealand. check it, kiwis: by combining hot and cold water into one faucet, one is able to achieve a wide variety of water temperatures. _why do they do this?_ hot water conservation maybe?

They do the same thing all over South Africa and it makes it awfully hard to was your hands with hot water and avoid getting burned. I really don’t get it either. Maybe it is just a southern hemisphere thing.

I’d like to add my own little sink using observations. There are some conventions that are so deeply engrained in me that I was completely unaware of them until they were defied in South Africa.

The first is that the hot is always on the left and the cold is always on the right.

The second is that taps marked in red are hot and those marked in blue are cold.

Both of these conventions hold true about 80% of the time in South Africa, or just often enough to lull you in to a false sense of safety before you scald yourself. I have waited forever and a day for my shower to get hot before I realized that it was “backwards”.