My brother Chad at the lake.

This past June my family of fourteen swarmed a two-bedroom cabin by a nearby lake like it was an anthill. We were everywhere. My youngest nephews were on the floor wrecking Matchbox cars. My youngest niece was doing her usual happy baby aerobics in her high chair hanging off the side of the kitchen counter. My dad and brother-in-law were just outside the patio door flipping burgers over a Coke and a beer. My sister was looking for diapers. The older nieces and I were munching on Doritos. And the women (minus my sister) were all in the kitchen at once, each working independently from the others, never getting in each other’s way, but somehow in the end finishing our fine buffet-style lunch in unison. It was like watching synchronized swimming, only in a kiddy pool.

“Mom, where’s the water?” Jayden asked as she picked through the fridge like a half-price rack at Old Navy.

“I don’t know, sweetie, I think we’re out,” my sister-in-law Sharla answered.

“Maaaam!” Jayden pushed the fridge door shut and sulked against it. “What am I going to drink?”

No answer. Her mom was busy unpacking a shopping bag of plastic plates and silverware.

Jayden looked at me sitting at the counter eating chips. She rolled her eyes.

“Why don’t you drink the water from the faucet?” I asked.

Jayden grimaced. “No way. I only drink bottled water from Sam’s.”

Apparently I was uninformed.

I suppose living out of the country for three years with only occasional visits is like being that kid at school who wasn’t allowed to watch TV at home, only a show or two at friends’ houses after school once in a while if he was lucky. Those kids never knew anything. They lived in another reality. And I honestly had no idea people thought it was cool to drink water out of bottles like they were drinking Coke. Nobody told me.

Of course as soon as my niece pointed out how cool bottled water was, I saw people drinking it everywhere, like I was in a bottled-water commercial.

I did some research online about bottled water because that’s the kind of geek I am and discovered that drinking bottled water is, in fact, a big deal. Selling water on American soil is now a multi-billion-dollar industry. The market reached $9.2 billion in wholesale dollar sales in 2004 [1]. Bottled water is the fastest-growing beverage category in the country [2] and has surpassed fruit drinks, even milk and beer to become the second largest commercial beverage, second only to carbonated soft drinks [3].

Drinking water is, of course, a good idea. The Mayo Clinic says the average person should drink eight 8-ource glasses of water every day (about 1.9 liters) [4]. I don’t drink that much water. I should drink more. Still, there’s something about this whole bottled-water business that bugs me.

I think it’s just that—it’s the bottled water business. People are spending billions of dollars on something they can get for pennies at home. One statistic I read said it costs somewhere between 240 to over 10,000 times more per gallon to purchase bottled water than it does to purchase a gallon of water from the tap at home [2].

Charles Bridge in Prague, The Czech Republic

Two weeks ago I was in Prague on vacation (this time, sans family), and I had time to think about the important things in life, you know, for example my stance on bottled water. Even with all these bottled water numbers in my head, I found myself settling in the middle of the debate. I actually found myself thinking about one or two good reasons to drink bottled water.

In Prague people don’t drink the tap water—too much lead or something. So while my wife April, my sister-in-law Heidi, and I were visiting (okay, so we did bring one sister-in-law along) we had to drink bottled water. Not that it mattered to the rest of them since they’d shoot up bottled water intravenously if they could, but the point is I had to drink bottled water too. I’ve tried to avoid drinking water from a bottle if possible, or in the worst cases, drinking from a bottle my wife has already used to avoid saying I actually drank bottled water instead of saying I reused an already existing plastic bottle—a noble cause, in my opinion. Anyway, I had to drink bottled water or get sand paper mouth. With the added factor that I was barely recovering from a cold that had put me down for the count for three days, I carried a water bottle with me wherever I went.

We saw the castle in Prague. We walked across Charles Bridge. We went for a promenade in such and such a park. We ate lots of dumplings. For three whole days I drank water from a bottle.

While I still think drinking water from a bottle is about as smart as setting money on fire, I did discover that drinking water from a bottle taught me one lesson. It taught me that water is limited and valuable. See, bottles are containers, and containers do two things. They hold a particular quantity, a particular limit of something, in this case, one liter of water. They also (in general) keep track of something that you want to keep track of—something valuable. I found that drinking water from a bottle reminded me throughout the day that water is a natural resource and is both limited and valuable. I would fill up my bottle in the morning from the eight-liter jug and would think to myself, “Okay now, you have to make this last all day. Drink it wisely.” Since I knew I only had one liter to drink, every sip was valuable to me. I thought about it.

Maybe this is a stretch, but I think families are the same way. Families are like bottled water. We bottle ourselves up every now and then in a condo or a little cabin because it’s our duty to keep track of each other. Most of the time we take each other for granted, but for those two weeks or so that we’re together, that’s when we remember that our time together is limited and we mean something to each other. We’re not strangers, we’re not necessarily friends either, but we are family.

Sources:
1. Beverage Marketing’s 2005 Market Report Findings
   www.bottledwater.org/public/BWFactsHome_main.htm
2. Bottled Water: Pure Drink or Pure Hype?
   www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/chap2.asp
3. Bottled Water Strengthens Position As No. 2 Beverage, Reports Beverage Marketing
   www.beveragemarketing.com/news2vv.htm
4. Water: How Much Should You Drink Every Day?
   www.mayoclinic.com/health/water/NU00283

Additional Sources (if you really don’t like bottled water):

5. Message in a Bottle: Despite the Hype, Bottled Water is Neither CLEANER nor GREENER Than Tap Water
   http://www.emagazine.com/view/?1125
6. Bottled Water: Understanding a Social Phenomenon (pdf document)
   http://assets.panda.org/downloads/bottled_water.pdf

While putting on prawn puppet shows for your friends is possibly the most fun part of cooking with prawns, a close second is sitting around a table enjoying good conversation and eating a plate or two of sizzling prawns with a bowl of bread. This is an art form you’ll learn well if you spend any amount of time in a Spanish tapas bar, and with this recipe, you can do the same at home or wherever you find yourself with an appetite for prawns.

Read my full recipe online at Other Spain Magazine. Here’s the link:

spain.othercountries.com/otherspain/pages/recipes/gambas-ajillo.asp

Yesterday I went to church, and at the end of the service Juan, the guy who makes announcements, mentioned that anyone who wanted to be in the Christmas choir could meet at the front of the room after the service.

A friend of mine had recently told me if I ever had the chance, I should join a Spanish Christmas choir because Catalonian Christmas carols (Catalonia being a region of Spain in the Northeast, near where I’m living) are known internationally. My friend told me every choir she’s been in, and she’s been in choirs in countries all over the world, has sung at least one Catalonian Christmas carol every year. Now that she was living in Spain, she wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to sing in a Spanish Christmas choir.

I walked to the front of the room to learn more. Sidling myself up to a new friend of mine, I asked him about the Christmas carols. I said something like, “A friend of mine told me Catalonian Christmas carols are beautiful. Do you know which ones we’ll be singing?”

He looked at me. “This isn’t Catalonia,” he said. “We’re more international. We sing ‘Silent Night.’”

Additional Resources:
If you’d like to learn a few Catalonian Christmas carols yourself this Christmas season, here’s a couple to get you started:

“El Cant Dels Ocells”
lyrics and sheet music

“Fum, Fum, Fum”
lyrics and sheet music