Originally Posted by
Tourist in MSN
A friend of mine traveled in Russia a couple of decades ago, he said that they would stand in the store and wait to see which brand of bottled water the locals would buy, then they only bought what the locals bought. Apparently not all bottled water in some foreign countries is trustworthy, the locals knew what to avoid.
I cycled across Russia in 2007 and in the process spent five months traveling between St Petersburg and Vladivostok. That brought me through and past a lot of smaller rural places.
Towards the end of each day, we would do our "water ritual". This was going into a nearby village/house with our water bladders and seeing where we could fill up. The sources of water varied. Sometimes we would be directed to a pump like in photo below. Sometimes there was a community pump house. Sometimes, they would disappear into the house and re-appear with the bladder filled. It varied, but we were pretty much getting our water where the locals got theirs as well. We didn't do much filtering, didn't buy much water and it wasn't until we were in the less populated east that we got groundwater from streams. That ground water we'd treat or filter.
Both of us did have occasion to be sick once or twice in the five months. I don't know if that was food, water or some other reason but overall it wasn't a big concern.
