As a five year old I fantasized about making an elaborate escape out of the doctor’s office when we had to get immunizations before going to Uzbekistan – but I ended up getting the blasted typhoid shot and so forth anyway.

In Tashkent, we had to drink filtered water I’m sure. But I still remember being sick for at least a few days. Then I naively insulted our Russian babysitter, telling her their water was nasty and I could never drink it. “Our water isn’t dirty; our water is clean,” she protested. I then pointed to some muddy brew coming out of an outdoor drainage pipe as evidence of my point, much to her horror (“We don’t drink that!”).

We had an above ground swimming pool in our backyard/courtyard, but the water wasn’t treated or chlorinated at all, so the pool had to be periodically drained and refilled (like a fish tank). One night while acting like a disobedient idiot I fell into the drainage cesspool, getting my feet tangled up in the pipes. In retrospect, I must have been a more troublesome kid than I realized.

It seems there was some rumor circulating about somebody dying from eating a watermelon, so we planned to avoid watermelons. The next thing I knew, one of our maids came home from the market with a watermelon, and we ate it anyway. Nothing bad happened.

I’ve heard Dad recall some story about some Russians who, upon realizing that American soldiers couldn’t drink the water, offered them Kool-Aid instead. It was a nice gesture, until everybody started getting sick at once because it turns out that the Kool-Aid was made with the water. Hahaha…

As for anti-tourism…well, as a military child I had some odd form of anti-tourist sentiment because I thought tourists were just cushy people goofing off while *I*, on the other hand, only went to foreign countries for *important* things. Shame on me for my arrogance!