thehumon:

I didn’t know this, but if people from other countries visits Northern Europe/Scandinavia for too long they can’t drink the water in their home countries.

This is a problem Northern Europeans and Scandinavians always have when going on vacations to pretty much anywhere else because our water has been filtered to hell and back, but I foolishly believed that if you grew up with less filtered water you’d be able to drink it forever. Not so. My housemate told me her dad’s wife had to learn that the hard way when she went to visit some family in Colombia a year after moving to Denmark. She was sick for days.

But yeah, convential wisdom around here says that you shouldn’t drink water from a tap if you go any further south than Germany. I had to drink bottled water when I lived in England for christs sake because it had too much chlorine in it. We would be fucked if the post-apocalyptic scenario happened tomorrow.

This is anecdata, but I know of two personal acquaintances
who *died* from illnesses picked up while visiting their/their family’s
country of origin; possibly due to their having lost any resistance to it from
years of living in Canada.