Don't drink the water

I struggle sometimes with exactly what to post about.  I mean, my day-to-day activities here aren't that exciting.  Someone told me to post about them anyway.  What happens here is still going to be different than how it's done in America.

So, today I'm going to tell you about the water.  We do get our water from the city, but it is held in a cistern (in our case under the carport) and then pumped to a tank on the roof.  From there, it is gravity fed down to the sinks, showers, toilets, etc.  This is "grey water".  It's not for drinking.  We drink bottled water; Aquafina actually.  We also have a water filter on our kitchen sink.  We can drink that water also, but usually we only use for water that we will be cooking with.

A few days ago, we ran out of water.   We didn't know that because of it being summer here, there was a low supply/high demand for water.  Therefore, the the city was rationing the water from its supply.  We did have some in the tank on the roof, but the cistern was basically empty.  So, one of our guards (we have them mainly to keep people from wandering onto the property) took the opportunity to clean it out.  Now I understand why we don't drink it.

In case you're wondering, we had water delivered by a water truck.  We had to pay a "service charge" for speedy delivery (i.e. next day, not next week or maybe even never at all), but we didn't completely run dry.

Don't you love the bamboo ladder?  I do!

Tirupati, one of our awesome guards.

That brown stuff on the floor is dirt.  It was all over
the walls, too.  At least there was no mold or critters. :)