Water. Or rather, drink tons of it. I’m in Zihuatanejo, Mexico right now doing some research for a couple of big Mexican parties I have coming up and I expected to learn plenty and of course fly home with some great recipes. I did NOT expect to get a lesson in capitalism.
Since the day we Californians even think about taking our first trip to Mexico, we’re warned: ” Don’t drink the water! ” Ha ha, so funny. This is similar to the stop, drop and roll training we get for earthquakes. Great. So, we all know about the water jokes. What did these freakin’ brilliant Mexican marketers do? They punked us! I’m at this great resort called The Tides and the SECOND you sit down, you get a “Water Menu.” What the…? This menu has about 8 different flippin’ water options on it, because we all know you can’t drink the stuff right out of the tap. So guess what, you get a million dollar choice of Ty Nant, Fiji, Evian, whatever, all at an astronomical price. It wasn’t until day 3 that I finally realized that not everybody could possibly be ordering off the Water Menu, right? So I asked if there wasn’t a slightly cheaper, Mexican bottled option that didn’t fly here from France on the Concord with a million dollar, Euro translated price tag? Por supuesto, there’s a Mexican version for like half the price (yes Mom, I did watch them break the seal in front of me so it wasn’t from a hose around back.)
Talk about making lemonade out of frickin’ lemons. Smarty pants Americans don’t want to drink our water, fine, here you go, big special expensive Water Menu. We’ll win anyway and laugh all the way to the bank. (In the interest of your attention span, I’m not even going to go into the whole discussion about this bottled water situation being the classic example of the Emperor without Clothes.)
Another great thing they do to add to the pomp and circumstance of your water situation, is that they offer you a MINIIIIIIIII choice of a slice of grapefruit, lime with yerba buena, mint, ginger, cinnamon (stick), raspberry, blackberry, etc to put in your water. By the way, these pieces are so small my 2 year old must’ve cut them and they don’t even add a ton of flavor but if we MacDaddied it out like we do with everything in the States, this could be a really cool upscale idea. I hate smart people. Adios for now, I’m thirsty.
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