Aqua

I've discovered that in the time since I got married (an event unrelated to the rest of this post), I've become a water snob. Except that unlike most water snobs, I'm not so much concerned about my drinking water. It's me bathing water with which I have issues.

I've been truly fortunate to have traveled all over the world, and almost without fail, the first thing I seem to notice when I go someplace new is the water, and Orlando is no exception.

Orlando's water smells like the sea and appears to be incapable of being absorbed by human skin. It just sort of hits your body and rolls off into the drain, leaving behind a kind of gray, scaly film.

We have fairly nasty water back home. It frequently exits the faucet looking a little bit like the hot dog au jus that you see brats being boiled in at a ballgame. But we have a good water softener and drinking water system which makes it all OK. Unfortunately I don't have these luxuries while on vacation.

Even the notorious water in China didn't both me all that much compared to Orlando. I suppose I spent so much time worrying about keeping it out of my mouth that I neglected to notice how oily and weird it was otherwise. And if I did manage to swallow some by accident because I started brushing my teeth and accidentally used the water from the tap because I was keeping an eye on the giant insect crawling along the baseboard, I would spend all of breakfast seated in close proximity to the bathroom, waiting for the inevitable attack. But at least the water didn't smell...most of the time.

I guess what surprises me is that the fine folks at Disney seem to be able to control everything from robotic mice to thousands of people in a theme park to the atmospheric conditions over their parks, so why can't they fix the water down here? Perhaps old Walt liked it this way. There had to be SOMETHING which suggested that moving to a swamp like Orange County, Florida was a good idea to him.