water :D

[afuna]

Ahhh so household water filters are finally cheap enough that we've decided to try installing one at home (it's still 15,000 pesos, the hell!). The guy who installed it showed me how it works. At one point, he turns on the purified water faucet, and lets it run, says that this is the drinkable water, I nod my head dutifully... and hide my intense cringe reaction over wasting the purified water.

This is sort of ridiculous because, while drinking water has often been inconvenient here, I've never had to worry about it being scarce.

When I was a kid, we used to fill these huge stock pots with water from the faucet, boil them to kill any bacteria, then keep them to the side for several hours to let any sediment settle before we could use them for drinking. This could be inconvenient and meant that we didn't take drinking water for granted, but it was never a matter of scarcity or worry. We had several of these huge pots, so in practice we just always made sure that we boiled a new batch of water when we were down to one or two. There was a bit of waste because you didn't want to drink the water at the bottom of the pot, and you had to be very careful when getting water near the bottom because you wouldn't want to stir up the sediment, but you know, it worked!

After that, and for a long time, we bought water in five-gallon containers, delivered weekly. Now that is very convenient, but the cost adds up, and you still have to keep track of when the water supply is running low and order new ones and wait for the new delivery....

And now it's coming out of the faucet. Granted, it's not the main faucet but drinking water. From the tap. ASDFHHH. I'm a bit weirded out by just how strong my reaction is. But ASDFGGFHFHHFHFHF.

Comments

[niqaeli]

This is pretty interesting to me, because I grew up knowing I could drinking faucet water... but not that I would always have it! We lived on well water, and the pipes would freeze, so we would keep these big 5 gallon tanks of water on hand in the bathrooms for our indoor plumbing for when the pipes froze, and then smaller jugs in the kitchen for drinking.

Running drinking water is one of those conveniences that's super weird when you think about it, though. We were honestly lucky that our well water was okay to drink as-is! That's not true for everyone in the area I grew up in, sadly. (Industrial poisons and other stuff. >:( ) And a lot of places in Tennessee, well, well water's your only real choice for running water, there's no city water to be had cos the pipes don't run out that far.

[afuna]

Oh wow that is a pretty interesting contrast with what I grew up with!

I'm somewhat comfortable with the idea of running drinking water in other countries, somehow. That is, even though I know not everyone has it, the idea that someone could doesn't strike me as out of the ordinary, entirely.

I am fascinated by the idea that well water by itself would be safe for drinking, without needing to be filtered or boiled or something! That is pretty cool.