Tap Water

The locals don't drink the water from the taps. Instead, consumable water has to be brought home in containers. Every convenience store (like OXXO) sells those blue 20L bottles of water and it's quite cheap (I was paying 22 pesos). There is also a lot of self made entrepreneurs who drive around the city and sell the water door to door. These guys are quite persistent and you can expect to hear one yelling "aaaaagua agua aguaaaaaaa" at least once a day. Some are on bikes others in cars, which is even more annoying because they keep honking all day. Not so good if you want to have some peace. However, this varies from area to area. What I suggest is to spend few hours around your new house/apartment before you decide to rent it. And I would repeat that over a few days if noise is of concern.



The city water apparently has too much chlorine in it but if you drink it accidentally nothing is going to happen. In many cases, the city water is delivered to a container beside a building (by low pressure pipes) and from there it is pumped to a container on top of the roof. The owner of the apartment pays for the electricity used to pump the water up. So basically once your water runs out you turn on the pump for ~30 mins and let the tank fill up. One thing I didn't like about this system is that there was no pressure, since it's gravity fed to your taps. Another thing that was worrisome was that anyone had access to our water container, but that probably varies from building to building.



I don't know how bad the water is but I made rice with it one time and nothing happened to me ;) Someone told me that for cooking it's ok.