The water in some parts of the U.S. tastes like absolute crap. The stuff where I live smells terribly of chlorine and comes out of the tap white and foggy with little "floaties" in it. It ruins the taste of juice, coffee, and tea. It's sort of like drinking a glass of water with a quarter cup of milk stirred in. Not very appetizing and definitely not thirst-quenching.

The water in the town where I went to college tasted better but was LOADED with sodium. We did a chemistry experiment on it in lab and had to dilute it 1:100 before the machine could even register the sodium levels (at which point they were still almost maxed out). The water we brought from Aurora, Colorado, on the other hand, had nothing in it but water. Colorado is known for good-tasting water.

I don't buy the small bottles of water but I do buy from the filter machines at 30 cents/gallon. I don't know how different that stuff is chemically but it tastes a Hell of a lot better than what comes out of the tap.

I'm not actually dumb enough to believe that 'spring water' really comes from a spring, though, and, as my mother pointed out once, "It may be from the Alps, but a lot of goats pee in the Alps every year . . . "