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We do have beverages sold in plastic bottles in Portugal.
I live in an area that attracts many British and other foreign tourists, so depending upon their locations some stores are strongly bent toward catering to their tastes. What I am thinking of is plastic bottles of water. This is purchased by most tourists who are going to the beach or sightseeing, and by Brits who buy huge supplies of it in the belief, I suppose, that our water isn't fit to drink.
I often trade in small mini-markets to avoid the hassle of long queues in the hipermercados during the summer especially. What is striking is that markets catering to the Portuguese have relatively small supplies of bottled water, whereas those located near tourist apart-hotels and developents that cater to Brits have cases of it stacked to the ceiling and blocking the aisles....between water and booze I don't think they have a euro left to buy food!
I always have a plastic bottle of water in the fridge to serve my Brit guests who want a glass of water. Of course, despite the label it is filled with tap water, but so far what they don't know hasn't killed them.
I rarely see glass bottles of beverages except for wine and beer.
One might also ask if it isn't a huge waste of money and energy to provide quality tap water if people only use it to take a shower or flush the toilet
I am quite happy with the tap water here, no odd taste or anything
Nor do I want to support Nestle and the few other water giants that are gradually buying up all springs around the world.
First of all, places with unsafe tapwater get very few (if any) visitors, so maintaining a supply of bottled waters for tourists is not a very high marketing priority.
Generally, urban tapwater can be safely consumed in nearly every country in the world. The exceptions would be towns that are prone to frequent flooding or have had recent flooding. As you indicated, I did not drink the tapwater in Tena, Ecuador. Nor in the Magdalena River bottom towns in Colombia.
In Hong Kong, the very old lead plumbing has led people to boil their tapwater, out of fear of heavy metals leaching into it. But boiling does not help, and in fact, it increases the concentration of heavy metals, but people boil it anyway. It probably makes sense for Hong Kong residents to subscribe to bottled water service, but a visitor is not likely to be affected by short exposure to the contaminants.
Actually you would be surprised that not too many countries in the world do have safe, drinkable tap water. That is somewhat of a luxury that we amongst a few other countries do have. China is one of them where they cannot drink it- certainly not a horribly poor 3rd world country that nobody visits- but they don't drink from the tap, nor should any visitors. Some boil their water before drinking to kill whatever is in it, but most just buy bottled water for home drinking use.
^^^ true! You can get it in some Mexican food stores - Goya makes it. However I never saw it as a single juice here, but only as a blend with other fruits.
One might also ask if it isn't a huge waste of money and energy to provide quality tap water if people only use it to take a shower or flush the toilet
I am quite happy with the tap water here, no odd taste or anything
....
Ditto. And I am quite mystified by those foreign residents here who buy bottled water.
When I lived in Madeira, which is like living in a greenhouse, I had an apartment on a cliff overlooking Funchal. To get down into the city I had to take a stairway cut into the cliff, walk through a banana grove and then through an area of chock-a-block houses with gorgeous flowers and vines growing on every wall. It was a constantly changing show.
But when the maracujá bloomed I could never resist stopping and peering intently at the blossoms - they look like something that should be growing on a coral reef.
The lane where my accupuncturist is has one at the end of it, which is in bloom now...and I still stop to look at those strange blooms.
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Originally Posted by kevxu
Ahhhhh, maracujá! Never saw it in the U.S., though.
Wonder why ..., it is such a good tasting beverage, I think !!
I do seem to think that some Latino stores might have something similar, no ? Have to check.
Having lived with the juice for years, we got withdrawal symptoms when we got back Stateside !! Especially with all that flavoured water you get here in the States.
A bit off topic but on the same frequency ...
In 1987, Europe got an ice cream bar called Magnum (made by Unilever)
We got hooked on that really fast.
Just a few months ago, they now market it at Walmart (of all places !).
So ... , maybe some day they will market Maracuia here ??
India took to "mineral"-water in a big way in the late 90's. Tap-water in India has never been a safe option, even for Indians who have grown used to it. We used to have these two-staged steel water-filters with a filteration candle in the top one. The filtered water would drop into the lower chamber from where it could be collected and drunk. UV Filters were available but they were prohibitively costly.
Then came the bottled water which became a kind of fashion statement because of the supposed qualities of the minerals in the mineral water and the fact that it was costly. For a while, serving these bottles of mineral water in weddings was considerd to be a show off how well-off the host is. But then the Govt. regulatory bodies started to question the authenticity of the "mineral" water and if they do actually contain some minerals. Eventually, a ruling was passed that most of the bottle water available in India is just purified tap-water and hence cannot be called mineral-water. The labels were required inidcate as much.
This is when the now purified-water prices started to fall to the point where it became quite affordable to buy a bottle when outdoors and not wanting to risk drinking tap water. Now bottled water can be found everywhere in India. Some are purified tap water, some are sourced from the springs in Himalayas and some claim to be Oxygen-enriched, but all are priced the same and very accessible. You can even buy huge 20 litre tanks of drinking water to use at home, expecially if you happen to live in a city like Bangalore that has a low water table or Chennai whose proximity to sea imparts a salty tang to it's tap-water.
Plastic bottles are also extensively used for selling soda. Somehow, the use of cans never caught up in India. So you will find plastic-bottle packaged Coke and Pepsi everywhere. Sadly, re-cycling is still not well-organized in India. Mostly we would collect the bottles, use some to store our UV filtered water in the refridgerator and the rest would go to the local kabaadiwala i.e. the scrap dealer.
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