Water Load Of Bollocks

I’m now back in China for a couple of weeks. It was not a good journey over here – the flight from Chicago to Shanghai was cancelled, allegedly because of a typhoon, necessitating a detour via Tokyo and an extra seven hours of travel time. And was there any evidence of a typhoon when we arrived? Was there fuck! So we drove the two hours to our fabulously dull hotel in Suzhou. You may wonder why I’m sharing this inconsequential information, but one of the things you have to remind yourself when you check in to a shiny Chinese hotel is that it’s a good idea to only drink the bottled water. When your hotel is a disease-ridden pox-hole this comes naturally but the outward opulence of some modern Chinese hotels lulls you into a false sense of security, potentially leading to excessive time on the porcelain.

This is one of the few occasions when I pay any attention to the water I drink. I mention this because I was reading about a Water Bar in New York that offers more than 52 waters, water tastings and catered water packages. Deciding that you want to attend a water tasting is a 100% certified guarantee that you are a colossal dick. I mean a real large, veiny, wobbly dick. This isn’t like wine tasting, where you pretend to enjoy expensive wine just to impress people; at least with wine you get something out of the consumption. With water tasting you just get to piss more often.

I can’t even imagine how you get to the point where going to a water bar is something you could take seriously. Isn’t there a little residual voice inside your head that whispers “you are a dick, you are a dick” all the while you’re there? This place apparently has “water experts” and offers a free gift when you order a water package worth more that $2,000. You know what you need when you buy $2,000 worth of water? A kick in the arse.

When I was a kid any water would do – we’d drink stream water because we couldn’t be bothered to go home when we were thirsty. It was a fascinating water, full of rich flavors, possibly the result of a decomposing sheep somewhere upstream. And it wasn’t a boring clear liquid; it was rich with tiny life-forms, microbes and algae. On a good day you had to chew it. We didn’t care, so long as none of us had just pissed in the stream.

Anyway, I thought that the idea of water was that it didn’t taste of anything. Its ingredient list is supposed to be very simple – water. If you want it to taste of something else then there’s no shortage of thinks you can add, from Kool-Aid to whisky. If you ever find yourself, however, standing in a bar swilling around some fancy water, bear in mind that its hard-to-place flavor was probably obtained by straining through a Bulgarian wrestler’s jockstrap. So now you can taste dick while you act like one!


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison