Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New York City Trip (Day 3)

By the third day of the trip, I was tired enough from the previous day's adventures/subway rides that I felt like sleeping in. And sleep in I did. I think I woke up at something like 11:30 or noon. Of course, that meant that a later start to the day, which started the vicious cycle all over again. By the time we rolled into Manhattan, it was about two in the afternoon. I had tentatively set aside Sunday to see something on Broadway, so we headed over to the tkts booth for discount tickets. There were actually various 3PM options, and after mulling our options, we figured it'd be a good idea to catch one of those. We settled on The Toxic Avenger , which was actually an off-Broadway option. However, we hadn't eaten yet, and the show started about 15 minutes after we got our tickets. Enter the food carts. There happened to be one right outside the theater, and the guy charged a little bit of a premium for the convenience. Still, I was hungry, and I had yet to try...
1 comment
Read more

Moment of Truth

I forget where I first heard it (I think it might have been Descartes), but I have long been a fan of the notion that certain things just have a " ring of truth " to them. If you've never heard the idiom before, the basic idea is that some things are super-true. They are not just true, but they are so obviously true, that as soon as you hear them, you recognize the truthiness inherent in them. I usually get excited when I hear one of these, since it means that I am a tiny bit less ignorant from that moment forward. For the first time in memory, though, I experienced the ring of truth. First, let me paint the scene with a little bit of background. I'd made plans to have dinner with my friend, but we'd agreed to play it by ear. The end result was that we ended up settling on a pretty late dinner in a local spot. That worked out just fine, since we weren't shooting for gourmet, we just wanted to grab some food and catch up in the process. So, we headed out to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Backlog

I am an information junkie. Always have been. I'm one of those people that cares far more about the storyline in a video game than the actual game play. At work, I will spend time researching things related to solved problems, because I want to know exactly why it failed in the first place. And if someone learns something new, I want to go see what it's about, because I want to know what they know. I know it's not exactly the average outlook on life, but it is what it is. Anyhow, this mentality leads to my habit of tracking various websites, blogs, and other internet web sources to keep my information flow constant. Doing all of this manually is tedious at best, though, so I use Google Reader  to organize all of these feeds. It just makes things simpler to have a single source of RSS feeds, so that I can quickly browse through items related to my interests. Given all of that, it should come as no surprise that I also try to keep up with my feeds on a regular basis. I ...
Post a Comment
Read more