Mit Kohlensaure

When I first started traveling here for monthly meetings, I always enjoyed water options. In America, bottled water is now everywhere. I am old enough to remember the laughter of soft drink distributors with their new lines of bottled water. These dumb people are buying water... in plastic bottles! What's next? Oxygen in a can? ha ha ha...

Here, there are water options even from a counter top dispenser. It seems the Swiss love their carbonated water. I do, too. I'm told it is best for digestion, or even a stomach ache, helps with gastronomic needs. For me, it creates certain problems. Room temperature, cold, and even soda water, or water with carbonation are the dispenser options here.

When I first started drinking wasser mit kohlensaure, I just thought it was a slightly salty soda water.

me: Wasser, bitte? (I am requesting a bottled water from someone behind a counter)
clerk: Mit Kohlensaure?
me: Uh... Sprechen Sie Englisch?
clerk: Mit gas?
me: I'm sorry?
clerk: Do you want your water with or without gas?
me: Uh, with, I suppose.

For my non-American readers, if you haven't already noticed, you should understand I have quite a juvenile sense of humor. My humor du jour is most often targeted at the age level of my children, because my delight is in making them laugh. This includes the easy-laugh bodily functions. Well, I'll just be direct, I never matured here because I still laugh uncontrollably.

So, imagine me at 3pm, having chugged cup after cup of carbonated water, and the noises my internals are making. If you multiply this times the super-strength dehydrating Swiss coffee I was drinking earlier in the day, the cacophony of accoustics rumbling from my insides are an incredible distraction to my co-workers. Not to mention my frequency of restroom trips. Even in the restrooms, I am faced with choices of being very loud, and laughing at myself, or trying to find ways of being discreet. I most often choose the former, because that's just me. Mit Kohlensaure.