My Normal: Drinking Water

I mentioned a couple of times in recent blog posts that I was happy to return to “my normal”. I think I should elaborate on what “my normal” actually is. There are so many things about my life here that are quite different from American life. By taking time to write about these things you’ll be able to get a better picture of my day-to-day life.

An added bonus is that I will have to look at my life through the lens of what is unique and special about it. I think everyone has a unique and special life in one way or another, but we often forget to see those things. What we see as normal or mundane in our own lives can, from the outside, seem exciting and wonderful.

So, here starts a series of blog posts about my normal, mundane, exciting and wonderful life.

Lets start with basics: drinkable water.

The water that comes out of the tap is not drinkable. Actually, technically I guess it is drinkable if I didn’t mind getting any number of stomach issues. I don’t, however, want stomach issues.

In order to get drinkable water there are a few things I must do.

Fill a bucket with tap water.

The black bucket = bad water.

Dump the black bucket of water into a BioSand filter. This filter is first filled with large rocks, then smaller and smaller rocks then topped off with sand. As the water moves through the sand, and the biofilm created by the sand, pathogens and solids are filtered out of the water.

The blue bucket = good-ish water.

The sand filtered water can be drunk, theoretically. I haven’t worked up the guts to just drink the sand filtered water straight, and since I have another filtration method in the house, just to be safe, I send the water through that as well.

Pictured below is my Katadyn filter. The blue-bucket water gets poured into the top and comes out the bottom drinkable. We fill up bottles with the water and set it to the side so that we always have lots of drinkable water ready to be used.

The three tubes inside the top portion are called candles. (When I first heard that term I was confused about how a flame could stay lit inside a plastic cylinder with water being poured over it…but then I figured out that candle doesn’t always mean a wick and flame.)

Anyway, the water gets filtered through these candles and comes out completely safe and ready to be drunk!

And that is my normal drinking water process.