Don't Drink the Water

Today, during the power outage at the office, I went to the shopping center with our translator Ary. We are about the same age, and although he speaks a few "European" languages, he says it's amazing that I can speak Japanese, which he insists would take him 20 years to learn. Nevertheless, his English is outstanding, and he translates documents like an efficient machine; churning out 5 pages in a couple hours at times. After we finished exchanging money, we headed over to the bookstore because I am looking for some books or software to start learning Spanish. I was looking for the Rosetta Stone series, but the tiny book store at Millennium Shopping Center didn't have it so he suggested the large, two-level bookstore inside the Manauara Shopping Center, so we headed over there. The bookstore there was, indeed, rather impressive, but they didn't have that particular series. I looked at a few others, but ultimately decided I would just order it from, yes, ironically, Amazon.com.
After we finished at the bookstore, we headed over to the food court. They have McDonald's there, as well as two Brazilian fast food joints, one called simply Bob's and the other Girafa's. Ary said both of them were terrible and if we were going to have a burger to get Micky D's Big Tasty. But we decided to bypass the heart attack food and, instead, go the an Italian restaurant in the food court. Ary ordered a fillet mignon parmigiana with pasta, and I ordered a vegetarian spinach lasagna. We also both ordered fresh juice, and I got the orange with acerola (a.k.a. Barbados cherry). Lunch was great, and afterwards we headed back to the office.
On the way, we were talking in the car, and Ary was telling me that he is also working as translator on another project to contract for a water treatment system in Manaus. He reminded me not to drink the tap water in Brazil, as it's probably full of who-knows-what. He said you have to be careful with ice cubes and juices, and that restaurants will sometimes claim they have a private well or something, but don't believe them. I'm pretty careful with that sort of thing usually, but then I reminded Ary that we'd just ordered fresh juice at the Italian place. He told me, "Oh, well, that's a big shopping center so they probably have their own private well." "But you just told me not to believe anyone if they told me that!!" I said, almost laughing from the irony of it.
Luckily, over 12 hours later and I've experienced absolutely no ill effects, so I suppose the juice at Manauara was safe.