Hi Tracy,

water quality (meaning it's hardness and taste) is very bound to where you are. Even within the same city it may change all the scale. It's allways right for drinking and always used to flush the toilet. The standard of pollution ist commonly much better than that of the bottled water. (If the pollution is to high, bottled water is called minerals). I lived a while in Mönchengladbach. The water ther was so hard that I need to buy bottled water for the tea! Not for the kettle, just to make drinkable tea! The water from the tap flocculates with the tea.

The habit of not drinking water is very old. In ancient time the towns where neat and designed to be autarchic. So anything must be within the citywalls.
The people start to create cesspools close to there houses, and for lazyness, the well was close by. For protection of the environment (odour) it was permitted to empty the cesspols only at strong frost. So sometimes the cesspols flood the wells. (If not the walls where to thin). People catch the idea of pollution and start to drink beer instead. (low alcoholic beer). It was commonly given even to toddlers! So whe have this defeat against water. This is deep inside us.
My idea to drink and ask for water from the tap is handled like a mental derangement by mostly everybody. The allways state "But we have bottled water!?". They are so bound to the idea of not drinking from the tap that they reject a glass of water from the tap but accept it freely from the water dispenser of a refrigerator. And the dispenser is piped to the tap!

Agnes
(Going to the tap <g>)

>When I was living in Germany no one drank the water. We were briefed when we entered the country to not drink the water too. In fact, when I first arrived, taking showers gave me a rash everywhere because the water was so hard. It took a few weeks to get used to it. All of my German friends never drank water either. Water is so hard in Germany that it can create problems with dialysis machines if a good reverse osmosis system is not used:
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>http://ndt.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/19/7/1925
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>Germany also uses alot of surface water in their taps which is surprising and scary. You've heard of the Messel lake deposits? Who knows what else in the water... :o)
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>>>Last Saturday I was going to an all-day choir practice and it really bugged me that there weren't any empty water bottles around (the kids lose them all) for me to fill up from the tap (faucet) and take with me - and I had to buy one from the shop. I don't know about Germany but here the tap water is as good or better generally. Some waters don't taste so good to some people though, esp. those from chalky and limestone alkaline sources - "hard" water. But I don't mind them and one can get used to a local water.
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>>Actually one of the first things I heard about Germany, as a kid, was a story brought by the Gastarbeiter in the neighborhood that the tap water is so bad there nobody drinks it - they drink beer or gassed drinks.
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>>Years later I visited and... well, the water depends, not too bad in most of the places, but didn't taste great either.
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>>As for the bottled water, I've read recently that someone managed to sell sand to the Saudis.