question answered

So since we moved back down to BeiGongDa I’ve been wondering- should we order a new bottle for the water dispenser (how do say 饮水机 in English, anyway?) the university supplies in each foreign teacher’s apartment, or should we just keep boiling water, pouring it into a bottle, and storing it in the fridge as we’ve been doing for quite some time now? And then I came across this post from Time’s Jodi Xu, and the question is answered: boil water. Really. Half the bottled water fake? That’s just plain ridiculous. That’s playing Russian roulette with three of six chambers loaded, except, of course, that the water is not going to be quite so immediately fatal. So in a city where half the bottled water is fake and the tap water is perfectly safe for those who live at the water treatment plants (it’s the crappy old pipes in between the treatment plants and your taps that fill the water with all that crud and pollution), I think we’re a lot better off just boiling the tap water.