Drinking the Water in Mexico
It is estimated that more than 20 million tourists will visit Mexico this year. I know because I live in Mexico and am seeing most of them pouring into the city where I live-Guanajuato.
Out of those 20 million, a small percentage will get sick. Oh, it won’t be anything serious. The will get upset stomachs, some diarrhea, and maybe your Linda Blair style projectile vomiting. Some of those sick ones will visit one of the local clinics, take some medicine, get better, and then head home with “stories” about Mexico.
That’s how they always get started-the stories!
“Oh, did you hear that Ralph and Gladys went to Mexico and got sicker than dogs?”
“Really? I bet it was the water!”
“Oh, no doubt!”
The water always is blamed by the small percentage of Americans who do manage to get themselves sick while visiting Mexico. Millions of Americans come each tourist season, have a great time, and never get sick. The relatively few who do get sick always blame the water.
Here are the facts about the water. A drink or two from the tap is not going to give you a case of some rare parasite that will surely kill you once you get back to the States. The water is NOT safe to drink regularly but in a pinch, sneaking a sip is not going to do you in. If you get sick within a few hours from something exotic you ate, then it is more than likely a food-borne illness and not the water.
The poor water here is blamed for everything! I brush my teeth with tap water (though my wife refuses to) and I am still alive.
There are rules that tourists have to follow in their eating habits when they come for a visit to Mexico that very, very few guidebooks tell you. I don’t know why they don’t but I suspect it is because rarely do guidebook writers rarely live in the country, much less the city, about which they are writing.
Therefore, here are the rules. You must follow them if you don’t want to get sick and end up spending you Mexican vacation time and money inside a Mexican clinic being healed from your culinary mishap. There are just two of them so this is a no-brainer!
1. Do not eat off the street! This does not mean do not eat the things you see laying on the sidewalks. What this means is that you will find street vendors operating the most delicious-smelling Food Kiosks that will push you to the limits of your human volition to resist! Why shouldn’t you eat the foods when you see all sorts of locals and a few gringo expats lining up with pesos in hand to buy what these Street Cooks have to offer?
You literally do not have the guts for it!
You do not have inside you what you need to protect yourself from the bugaboos that lurk in these not-so-clean and not-so-tidy Street Vendor’s kitchenettes on wheels. Many tourists will end up learning this lesson the hard way. They will buy what the vendors are selling, wolf it down with a fiendish culinary delight, and then hours later he or she and the hotel toilet will become intimate friends for the next few hours.
The locals and we seasoned expats have guts of steel and can eat this stuff with rarely an aftereffect. It took my wife and I almost two years before we could eat from a Street Vendor without getting sick. We now have super-guts. We have “guts of steel!”
2. The second rule to follow is that you will be forced to eat in a lot of restaurants while vacationing. That is how it works! You come to Mexico and spend ungodly sums of money that you will later wish you hadn’t. Restaurant eating is one of the places where that will happen.
The rule of thumb for restaurant eating is that if you DO NOT see a preponderance of Mexicans eating at a particular establishment, and instead the place is loaded with gringos-DO NOT EAT THERE BUT RUN IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION!
Local, well-established Mexican-owned restaurants care deeply and fearfully for their reputation with the nationals. Their livelihood is contingent on having zero health problems. They simply cannot afford a mass infection of their patrons with some food poisoning event. This is because the nationals will tell everyone they know, ever knew, or whom they will ever meet never eat where they got sick.
To be honest, the places where gringos most frequently gather to eat is a risk-free thing for the owners. Let’s say some employee was naughty after using the bathroom and didn’t wash his or her hands and the patrons get sick. The risk is low that some gringo is going to go back to the U.S. and be able to ruin the restaurant’s reputation. However, a Mexican national is a loaded gun who can do some damage.
Where you see a preponderance of Mexicans chowing down, you can be relatively sure of the safety of the food handling and that the owners crack the whip on employees following the proper food handling procedures.
That’s about it. Come to Mexico, enjoy yourself, and follow my food eating tips and you will be in the millions who can go back home telling how much fun you had seeing the sights instead of the inside of a Mexican hospital room!
