The perils of shopping for water

There are a few schools of thought among foreigners in Bishkek about the drinkability of tapwater here. Some have a water filter and boil their water, some just boil the water, some buy bottled water and drink this exclusively (though they will drink chai when eating out or at friends' places), and some happily drink tapwater (this appears to be the smallest group and usually those who have been here for a long time).

My current practice is to boil tapwater, though a friend informed me last night that this does not address the main problem, which is heavy metals in the water. Anyway, yesterday I ventured out to Nerodni, which is a kind of departmental store across the road from where I live. I figured that in stores of this sort, the price of everything is written down and then your items are scanned and the amount you have to pay appears on the cash register, so that the whole shopping experience can proceed perfectly smoothly with or without command of the Russian language.

Well. I was wrong. One of the things I wanted was two water bottles which I could use to store boiled water. Confronted by a shelf full of different varities of bottled water, ranging in price from 16som to 25som (about 70c to A$1) and all labelled and described in Russian, I picked two mid-range bottles. I returned home to open the innocuous bottle pictured - and water fizzed out all over my kitchen floor! Turns out Europeans or something love carbonated water and most of those bottles were probably carbonated. I am informed that a way to tell carbonated from non-carbonated water is by squeezing the bottles - carbonated water bottles will be harder and firmer than non-carbonated water bottles. (This, incidentally, was probably ironically one reason why I picked those particular bottles - in my ignorance, they felt solid and thus re-usable.)