Oasis II

I like this Oasis water. Today's bottle reads:

Good Morning! If you are pregnant, drink water before sleeping to reduce the chances of morning sickness.

This wasn't funny in and of itself, except that I kept thinking about how I have to stop drinking water, out here, at least two hours before bedtime, or else I'll have to get up to pee in the middle of the night. You drink water all day; it takes the body a while to get rid of it all. And I was thinking to myself, pregnancy tends to smoosh your bladder around a bit. Drink too much before sleeping and you probably won't sleep at all.

Then I turned the bottle around. It lists the mineral content and a little guarantee, and then notes that it was

Produced by OASIS PURE DRINKING WATER FACTORY L.L.C.

My water comes from a factory.
Of course, the same could be said for Dasani or Aquafina or any of the large American bottled water producers, but they'd never call it a "factory." They'd say there a "processing facility" or something, but not a "factory." Factories are dirty, smoky, and filled with pollutants, right?

Lately the base has been taken over by boxes of Aquafina bottled water. This is an unfortunate thing. I imagine some politician came over here and saw that we're all drinking foreign water, and decided that an American company needed to supply water to the troops overseas. Because, you know, that foreign water's tainted.
So we've been invaded by Aquafina.

It pains me to say that this is by far the worst water available on base, on all counts. To begin with, it has the least competent packaging of any of the waters we drink (Masafi, Oasis, Makkah, and Emirates being the most common local ones); the cardboard boxes are inadequately sealed and fall apart, and the bottles themselves have these horrible sealed caps on them. All the other water bottles have standard sealing rings; you break the seal, take the cap off, and a ring of plastic stays on the bottle. This is what you normally see on plastic bottles.

Not Aquafina. Aquafina's bizarre little seal pops off the bottle and falls on the ground, almost without fail, forcing you to bend over and pick it up and then find a trash place to dispose of it. It will come as no surprise that there are now little Aquafina rings on the ground all over the base--at least the locals who've been hired to keep the place clean do a good job of picking them up. But they shouldn't have to.

And when you do take the seal off the bottle, there's this weird little tab of plastic left on the lid, which gets in the way when you try to put it back on the bottle. Pointless, stupid, bad packaging. No reason for it.

It gets worse, though. The local bottled waters--not really local, they're all from the UAE or Oman--all taste... like nothing. They're clean. They all have mineral content, but they don't taste like anything--no chemicals have been used to treat them, and they just taste like clean water that's been pulled out of a spring. This is what Zephyrhills water (which I will never drink for constitutional reasons) tastes like, back home.

Not Aquafina. It tastes like the chemicals that were used to treat it. After a few weeks of Oasis and Masafi, it tastes decidedly off. I assume this is what Americans are used to, but as I said relative to our other water it tastes quite bad.

The bottles have huge labels on them, covering easily 60% of the surface area. Consequently I have to tear the labels off before I can make sun tea in them. And when I did make tea in them the other day, all three bottles came out very weak and nasty. I took the labels off. The bottles are only 500ml, the same size as Emirates and smaller than the other brands, so that's not the reason (I prefer Emirates for tea). And it was 108 degrees that day and plenty sunny. There was no reason why the tea should have been weak. It must be the chemical crap in the water. Makes me wonder if I should use bottled spring water when I make iced tea at home.

Yep. It's Oasis water for me. Wonder if they have it back in the states?