The Great Sparkling Water Chaos

Ciao 🤍

It's another surprise travel week over here,

so this cat's been living the romantic Italian life all week.

Gotta say, though, out of all of Europe, Italian food is pretty much impossible to mess up.

Kind of like traveling in Japan — even with zero research, you can eat pretty much anywhere and it'll still be solid.

It lines up really well with what Taiwanese people tend to like.

Same deal in Italy.

These past few days, whenever we get hungry, we just pull up Google Maps and look for anything nearby with 4+ stars,

or if a restaurant just looks good from the outside, we walk right in.

Compared to the rest of Europe, honestly, it's been pretty great (lol).

But here's a funny thing about Europe —

they are absolutely, unbelievably obsessed with sparkling water.

I'm not against sparkling water myself — sitting down for a proper restaurant meal, a glass of it is totally fine.

But when I'm out traveling and just need to quench my thirst, still water is always my first pick.

Sure, over here you can technically drink straight from the tap,

but given the choice, I'd still rather have bottled still water.

And every single time we stand in a convenience store trying to figure out which bottle on the shelf is sparkling and which is still,

we ALWAYS, without fail, end up with sparkling water 🙄️

Every single time! Why does this keep happening??

Doesn't matter how long we deliberate, how much we shake the bottle to check for bubbles,

two or three of us huddled around debating it,

the moment we're all convinced "yeah, this one's definitely still water" —

we pay, crack it open, and—

"pssshhh..."

DAMN IT, sparkling water again?! (losing my mind)

You're probably thinking, isn't sparkling water just labeled "sparkling water"?

Nope — Europe just does not do English labels.

The packaging is covered in foreign text, and even after way too long with a translation app, you still can't tell which bottle is actually the right one.

And you'd think with basically 50/50 odds, we couldn't possibly get it wrong every single time, right?

It's like plugging in a USB cable and getting the orientation right on the first try —

the actual odds are somehow way worse than 50/50.

Let me just throw my hands up at the sky and yell: universe, are you messing with me right now??

If you actually want to figure out European sparkling water labels,

you might need to check German, Russian, French, Turkish, Italian, Spanish... you name it.

Europe just has way too many languages going on.

So honestly, half the time I'm staring at a label having no idea what language I'm even looking at.

Recently discovered Google's photo-translate feature is actually pretty great for this,

though the catch is you need decent internet for it to work,

and half of what it spits back is just noise anyway...

After way too much deliberating, we just end up gambling on one.

And once again, going to bed drinking sparkling water. Ugh.

Does everyone else like sparkling water?

Feel free to comment and discuss, or better yet, teach me how to actually buy the right bottle of still water at a European supermarket.

See you all next time 🌹

Ciao Ciao