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Agua Con Gasifier

A couple of years ago, the Mild Wife and I thoroughly enjoyed a trip to Buenos Aires. We have a lot of happy memories about that trip, but one of the more surprising ones was that we had a legitimately good time chowing down on vegetables at some Asian restaurants. I still somewhat suspect that this may have been a result of the local restaurants near our hotel, but in either case, we genuinely enjoyed those vegetable-heavy meals.

One other interesting side effect of this trip was that we also grew to appreciate club soda. I don't quite remember at what point we realized it, but we realized at some point that if we consumed a glass of club soda around meal times, it seemed to help with digestion. I'm sure I can come up with some quasi-logical reason for this, but honestly, I don't know why this is true (it does, however, seem to be true according to WebMd). All I know is that we felt better if we had more club soda, so we started mixing that in with our meals.

Now, it's not called "club soda" in Argentina. In fact, I'm not sure it's called club soda anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world. The term I've heard far more frequently is "agua con gas." It means, quite literally, water with carbonation. Now, those are short, simple words, and they roll off the tongue quite nicely. If you give me a choice between saying "agua con gas" and "club soda," I'm going to pick "agua con gas." And since the Mild Wife understands enough Spanish to know what that means, we joyfully called it agua con gas for the length of the trip.

In fact, we enjoyed saying that so much that we continued to refer to the beverage as "agua con gas" even after we returned home. I mean, it's not like it stopped being fun to say. And we both understand what those words mean, so we don't lose any meaning during the process. If anything, saying those words brings up some happy memories, so it's got a bonus side effect of reliving some happy times.

So, we came home, and we continued to call it "agua con gas" and we started purchasing it more often than we had in the past. It still wasn't a super common item in our household, but we did buy them enough that it was a reasonable thing to ask whether or not we had agua con gas in the pantry. The answer frequently depended on the last time we'd gone shopping and felt the itch for a beverage, but you get the idea. It was a legitimate conversation piece.

Well, recently, we decided to splurge and get our own. We have been cooking at home a lot more often during the pandemic, so what we want to eat and drink have become more of our own responsibility. At one point, we felt like having agua con gas, but hadn't gone to the store to get any. Well, that very quickly led to the realization that we could make our own if we purchased one of those machines that carbonates your beverage. It arrived recently, and we have been happily making our own carbonated drinks.

You want to know the best part? We call it the agua con gasifier. It shouldn't take too much guesswork to figure out why we chuckle every time someone calls it that.
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