Don’t you just love to walk into the kitchen at any time of the day, grabbing a glass from your cabinet, opening the tap, letting the water run to cool down..., fill the glass up to the brim and have a big gulp of a cold nice crisp water!
Well you can count yourself as one of the privileged ones. In many places in the world, the household water is not optimal for consumption, this means that you have to go out and buy water in these classic looking office water tanks, but for the home. This water you would use for all your drinking, cooking, coffee, and your little dog friends, if you have some of those (or any other animal really).
Iceland is really fortunate to have such an abundance of free, clean and fresh water. So much so that wasting water is not really a big topic really until recently, when the world has the vision of going more green.
So the instant when you run out of drinkable water in your house, it's not just a matter of walking to the sink and filling up a glass anymore. You have to go outside and buy more water to drink, and let me tell you: all the water you are going to drink you need to purchase, so you are not going to the store to buy a two liter bottle… You go to the store and buy two twenty liter huge bottles of water, hoping that it lasts at least the week before the next heavy lifting.
Same goes for the household water that you would use to shower, wash the dishes, scrub the floors and so on. The water has the tendency to sometimes stop flowing, if it's a problem with the pipes of the building or a larger section of the city. Being México City, water is a major issue. The once gleaming city that stood in the middle of large lakes, now stands on a dry lakebed while the lakes have been piped up and moved underground, making the old lake water non-drinkable because of the pollution of the mega city standing on top of it.
The network of pipes has a hard time feeding the vast amount of water to its citizens, so water issues are frequent, especially in certain neighbourhoods. Leaving you possibly unshowered for a day or two, or even more if the issue persists. While at the same time, the city as a whole is sinking into the dried old lakebed it occupies, giving engineers worries for the future, as well as giving environmentalists the idea of spreading out its citizens and restoring the city to its former glory that is Tenochtitlan.
Will we see the concrete jungle give rise to people sailing between chinampas on small boats as tourists do in Xochimilco?
