AGUA

Here it Mexico, you can't just drink the tap water.  Instead you have to buy water in these big jugs for drinking and cooking.  I think that it makes a lot of sense.  Why pay to have your shower, toilet, and hose water be clean enough to drink?  As a result the water bill is less because you're not paying for filtered hose, shower and toilet water.  But it does mean that you have to make some effort to get water.  What my family here does is have two water jugs.  That way if one is empty it's not urgent to fill it up because we have the other one.  When a jug is empty you have two options; you can walk with the super heavy, big, awkward jug over to a water place and get it filled up, or you can flag down a water truck which costs a little more.  The water trucks are just pickups with the flat back filled with jugs of water.  They have speakers out the windows and you can hear them all the time "Agua! Agua! Deiz pesos! Agua!".  The problem is that they drive pretty fast down the streets.  You'll hear them and think 'Yes yay I need agua!' but when you run out the door onto the street you get there just in time for them to fly by.  So when one of the jugs is empty you're always on your toes with ears wide open, listening for a distant cry of 'Agua! Agua!'. And then when you do hear it you run like a crazy person onto the street screaming 'AGUA AGUA!'.  Hoping that either they haven't driven all the way past yet or that they'll hear your frantic cries.  If things go how you want them to they park in front of your house real quick and you hand them ten pesos and an empty jug in exchange for a filled jug of water.  One thing which makes it a little complicated is that there are good water trucks and bad water trucks.  Each water truck is just a different guy who has one of the big fancy water filters and has made a life of agua.  This means that some trucks are better than others because some people are more careful with their agua business than others. Ellen said they used to get agua from this one truck that's red,but there would sometimes be stuff in the water which is bad.  Getting water is definitely more of an adventure when you live in Mexico!