all bottled up

That looks like rows of mineral water bottles you'd find in a typical supermarket but those bottles are actually sitting in our kitchen. That by the way, is our daily source of drinking water. That's how we do it here.. we don't drink from the tap as the water here contains limescale or what they call hard water. Some people don't mind drinking from the tap here but I find the taste pretty awful even after the water has been boiled. That's why you'll notice people stacking up their trolleys with packs of bottled water in supermarkets here.

Hard water proves to be a bother. Not only it's undrinkable, it can ruin your washing machine in the long run with the build up of limescale so each time I do the laundry, I have to put this anti-limescale product in along with the detergent to prevent damage to the machine's internal 'organs'. Besides that, hard water will leave behind unsightly residue in the bathroom and around the tap.. and also ugly water spots on your clean dishes if you leave them to drip dry in the drainer.

Well this is one of the things I had to adapt to when I first came here. So every week, we (well my hubby rather) have to lug heavy packs of water home when we do our grocery shopping. We consumed around 10 2ltr bottles of Volvic weekly... and I have the pleasure of crushing countless empty bottles on a regular basis.

Well, I never thought I'd be drinking so many bottled water in my life.