Don't Drink the Water & Montezuma's Revenge

I don't know whether it is still true, but, it used to be that when one traveled you were warned against drinking the water. I guess you could eat all the strange and foreign food you wanted to but ya had to wash it all down with bottled water!


That is absurd! Besides, it is generally food that is foreign to your diet that causes the dreaded "runs" known in Mexico as Montezuma's Revenge.

I can remember as a kid in Mexico watching to bottled water company pulling their truck into a gas station and guess what? That's right, boys and senoritas, they would fill every one of those water bottles with regular tap water. Non of that hi test stuff for the suckers who would pay top peso for bottled water.

My folks followed the adage that if you drank bottled water you would avoid getting Montezuma's revenge. If you washed all of your vegetables in water that had been treated with iodine you would stay healthy.
My mom dutifully showed our cook the iodine tablets, gave her instructions, and when we moved out of the house seven years later.... yep... that bottle of iodine pills were sitting on the shelf right where my mother had left them so many years before.

Bottled water was delivered to our house on a regular basis. Huge 100 liter bottles that lived in a tilt stand. We all drank bottled water. Leastwise my parents did. When I went to a friend's house and wanted a glass of water the lady of the house would draw water from the kitchen tap... yep... I drank the water and lived to tell about it!