Food and Water

Do you like mysteries? I like mysteries.

Let's start with the good news: I do not currently suffer from a waterborne illness. Bad news: I am troubled by some waterborne enigmas. In particular I have three questions about the water. We will get to food in a moment.

1. Where does the water supply for Vlorë come from?
2. Why is the water pressure so inconsistent?
3. So is it safe to drink the tap water or not?

Naturally, I've done some research on some of these topics, though not as much on the second question. The information isn't super easy to find.

I believe I've found the source of the water. (By this I mean I found it through research, I haven't been to it.) There are aquifers on the north side of Vlorë Bay, under the mountains near the Adriatic Sea. The quality of water in these aquifers is supposed to be very high, it's clean and good for people. And this aquifer is tapped for the city of Vlorë and a few of the surrounding smaller towns. There is a nature preserve in that area called the Vjosë-Nartë Delta Protected Area that looks lovely in pictures. There are wetlands which are popular with migratory birds, and a Byzantine monastery which is presumably popular with monks. It looks fun to visit but it would take me six hours to hike to it. So it might have to be a "by car in the future" trip.

The water pressure situation is a bit more perplexing. Alrica and I are staying in a second floor apartment. (This is what Americans would call the third floor, two floors up from the ground floor.) And frankly, the water pressure is neither strong nor consistent. Sometimes I will be showering in more-than-a-drizzle-less-than-a-spray pressure, then it will jump up to qualifies-as-a-spray-but-nobody-would-call-it-a-deluge territory, and sometimes jump back down. Obviously this must have to do with what other water usage is going on in the building. This hardly seems like a mystery.

But what is providing the water pressure? Well, I have some hints. The biggest of these is that when we lost power last week for 18 hours, we started to lose water. There was barely a trickle toward the end of our time without power. That evidence supports the idea of electric pumps directly pushing the water into the buildings. Possible, yes?

But there are much taller buildings than the one in which I am living. What happens there on high floors? Do they have electric pumps constantly pushing the water up? It could work, sure, but consistency would be a constant problem.

Here's what I find confounding: There are mountains very near Vlorë. You can see them easily throughout the city. Here are a couple of pictures.

That's Old Town Vlorë, but you can see the mountains in the background

 

The bay is striking, but you can't miss the mountains

Why do the mountains matter? It is an opportunity for the municipal utility authority to use gravity to provide the pressure. Sure, these mountains aren't very tall, but they are taller than the buildings in the city. So the utility authority could build tanks up in the mountains, use pumps to get the water into them, and then connect the city water system to the tanks. That way the weight of the water above the tallest buildings would push on the water in the system and keep pressure even at those top floors. You wouldn't need the electric pumps to run every time someone wanted to shower. You would just run them when the tank was running low.

Of course there is a cost to building this system and maybe that's why it doesn't exist yet. It would not be free to build pipes out to the mountains nor to build the tanks and the pumps. But it would solve the pressure problem and it would mean that during loss of electricity, the city wouldn't be without water (until the tanks ran dry.)

As for drinking, Alrica and I follow this general rule: If bottled water is cheap and everywhere, then you buy bottled water. It's cheap and everywhere because everyone is drinking it. Whereas, if bottled water is harder to find (not in big containers right in the front of all the markets) and expensive, then the locals aren't drinking it, and we should drink the tap water. Here in Vlorë, the bottled water is everywhere and it is cheap. We are buying ten liter containers, trying to use up less plastic. Though we go through one of those about every five days or so.

I am using tap water to brush my teeth, so it's not that I am super afraid of bacteria in the water. And when I search online about whether or not the tap water is safe to drink, there are three camps (and you expected only two): There is the "yes, but it might not taste great" camp, the "no, you will be exposed to germs" camp, and the "no, it's not germs, the water is treated to kill the germs, but nobody is really removing the heavy metals" camp. I wonder how much cadmium and thallium I'm adding to my body when I rinse my toothbrush in tap water. My toothbrush doesn't feel any heavier.

Leaving the happy topic of heavy metals behind, (now that's an award winning transition,) it's always fun to visit grocery stores, to see what is similar and what is different. Today we went to Spar. Spar is a grocery chain that is throughout many parts of Europe. In fact, we were in one in Vienna just a few weeks ago. And being a multinational European chain, that means it is also a multilingual European chain.

Visual Aid 1 for the following paragraph

 

Visual Aid 2 for the following paragraph

Check out these sauces: Mexico sauce and American dressing. On the front we see Mexico and American both spelled as we might expect. But on the back, where all the details must be listed in Albanian, we see different spellings: Mexiko and Amerikane. In Albanian, the letter "c" is pronounced like the "ch" in chocolate. So they would use a "k" to get our English "c" sound in Mexico or American.

Visual Aid 3 for the following paragraph

 

Visual Aid 4 for the following paragraph

Here is another interesting label. The product is ceci and from the picture I can glean that this must mean chickpeas. But the Albanian word for chickpeas is "qiqrat". So why is this product labeled "ceci"? Turning the can so you can see the back of the label answers that question. Ceci is the word for chickpeas in Italian. In fact, the label provides two languages, designated by an oval with letters in it. The first, the oval with I, is Italian. The second, the oval with HR, is Croatian. That might seem weird, expecting "Croatian" to start with a "C". But the Croatians call their country Hrvatska and call their language Hrvatski. That's why it's HR. But what you don't see is any label in Albanian, even though we are in Albania. I guess to stay profitable you can only make so many different labels for the same product.

It does bring up another mystery. Take a look at this label from a jar of Nutella. It has lots of languages on the back. And you see when something is labeled in Albanian, the abbreviation is AL. That seems to make sense until you remember that Albanians call their language Shqip and they call their country Shqipëria. I don't have the answer to why it is AL and not SH or SHQ.

Visual Aid 5 for the preceding paragraph (mixing it up a bit)

I realize that discussion of everyday things like food and water doesn't rise to the rarity of a boat trip or visiting a Byzantine monastery (which is an everyday thing if you are a Byzantine monk.) But I enjoy the adventure in the non-monk everyday things too, as is most strongly evidenced by my obsession with hydrant pictures. Why am I this way? I don't know, that's a mystery for you to unravel.