Drinking Water

There is an India way of drinking water from a shared vessel. You lean your head way back and pour the water into your mouth, making sure your lips never touch the pitcher. This is hard for americans and we often end up with water all over ourselves (when we try to do it for fun from our bottled water). It would be unsanitary, gross and rude to touch the pitched to your lips. What is funny from an American poit of view is this. On rural walk, our guide stopped at a farm house and asked for water. The woman who he asked got a silver cup, shooed the goats (they had been drinking) away and dunked it into a trough. She rubbed the cup with her hands to kind of clean it. Still dripping wet, she took the cup and dipped it into another equally sketchy water source and gave it to our guide who happily drank it the indian way. I wanted to point out that the goats had just been drinking from the trough and she had not dried it or anything and the other water source was probably equally contaminated, so not touching it to his lips was the least of his problems, but when in India...