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27.12.09
Back to the trip...
I got hooked on churros when I was five. We had driven to Disneyland with a detour to Mexico (less than an hour in Tiajuana, from my recollection, I think my Dad wanted to cross that border just to say he did it). Somewhere in Southern California I started a habit of hot ridged fried dough, crisp and cinnamon sugared on the outside, soft and warm on the inside. There are pictures.
For some insane reason, they haven't made a widespread leap across the border. Perhaps I don't frequent enough Latin American eateries*, but I don't encounter any this side of the 49th.
My penultimate churro was in, of all places, Malaysia. I spent a couple nights at a resort which catered to an international clientele, and there was a beautiful pile of freshly made churros on the dessert table. Of course, I met no one from the Americas when I was there, but fried dough transcends all cultures.
It seemed a bit more pedestrian, however, to encounter a warming oven full of them on the hot-dog-or-pizza counter in a warehouse food outlet. Still, for $2.50 I got a hot dog, a large drink, and a churro. I started with the churro, which was decent, if not awe-inspiring and for that price, they could quickly become a habit. You can see how it would be cheap and easy to have a diet of saturated fats and refined carbohydrates. Perhaps it's a good thing such tantalizing prospects are not more readily accessible.
*Not that I don't like the food, I loved what we ate in Costa Rica, and could really go for some Gallo Pinto once in a while. It's just that the cheese factor often exceeds my levels of tolerance. Yes I could ask them to hold it, but that's like going for Sichuan and saying "Don't make it hot".
Tubby looked for shoes in which to go running. I, being helpful, picked out all the ones in neon and metallic gold. They also had one with a clear plastic sidewall, giving everyone a good view of your socks, or the moisture from your foot condensing. After expressing concern over the style where you can stick your finger right through the heel she settled on what could have been the identical model to the one she was already wearing.
26.12.09
The first whispers came from a blog I follow; the author, who lives in self-proclaimed American "flyover country" was heading coastward and there was the chance she would get to go to a fabled grocery store of legendary treasures known as "Trader Joe's". What followed was an impassioned love-in of comments listing various people's favourite items, along with helpful hints of where to go in the store to find said items. The goods listed seemed like they could be applied to Christmas gifts, and the store culture seemed positive, so I added a stop to our itinerary.
On further research, TJ's doesn't use any preservatives or artificial flavours or colours, uses non-GMO products, and, unlike almost every other stop we were making, the products were not shipped in from some country with cheap labor and questionable food standards.
We pulled into a very full parking lot and came across a hand-lettered sign reading "Have you left your re-useable bags in the car?" which we had not. On entering the comfortably scaled and wood-panelled enclosure, we passed a group having a neighbourly discussion about how much they dislike the mega-mega mart. The staff joked around with the regular customers and we quickly accumulated products including ethically sourced and single-varietal chocolate, unsweetened dried fruit, and healthier knock-offs of major junk food genres. We were checked out in a speedy and friendly manner, filling our re-usable bags with what may have been the only guilt-free purchases of the entire trip.
And back to the present day...
Slightly younger cousin at our post-Christmas morning gathering: "You said you didn't know what you got me."
Me: "I wasn't going to tell you what your present was."
"You lied to my face!"
"That's the spirit of Christmas;
Gee, where did these presents come from?
Uh... strange man broke into our house and left them for you.
Where'd he come from?
North Pole.
How'd he get here?
Flying reindeer."
It always amazes me how television news refers to boxing day shopping as "saving money". No, depositing money in the bank at a rate of interest that meets or exceeds the rate of inflation is saving money. Going boxing day shopping is spending money, there's a difference.
22.12.09
Butter cost less than one third of what we pay at home. Why? Dairy cartels? Are our cattle required to be fluently bilingual? The real answer probably lies in the economies of scale and some industrial farming practices we'd rather not know about. Still... that cuts the cost of Christmas baking materials down substantially.
We left this perishable product to one of the later purchases, and thus ended up pulling off the highway the night of our return to run some butter across the border. It was pretty much all we stopped for, so we grabbed a few bricks and headed for the checkout. We stood in line for a minute, then I went back and grabbed a few more. Other people's more varied purchases surrounded our ziggurat of saturated fat inching down the conveyor belt. If I were alone (or overweight) I probably wouldn't have gone through with it, but two conspiratorially smirking people are invulnerable to the snickers of those around them.
"A lot of butter," commented the checkout guy, smiling.
"Christmas presents," I offered in way of explanation.
"I could try putting some in my wife's stocking, but I think it would melt."*
"We're going to turn them into cookies first."
"Have fun."
And we escaped into the chilly night, laden with our buttery spoils.
*No double entendre. None.
21.12.09
I bought cool socks at a particularly awesome store in the States. The socks were discounted if you bought three pairs. The cashier rang them up and it came out as regular price. I brought up the discount and she had some trouble figuring out how to get that into the register. Eventually she called in a co-worker who punched some things through and it came out correctly. She processed my purchase then asked, "Could I get your zip code?"
"V5A..." I began.
Her eyes widened as if her computer screen just switched into hieroglyphics.
"It won't let me input letters." She turned to her co-worker, "Can I just skip it?"
"Yes," he wearily replied.
We visited two clothing outlets owned by the same parent company. Let's call them the Colonial Exploitation and the Void. I bought nothing at the former, and two deeply discounted plain t-shirts at the latter, because the styling at the first place is too Republican, while the second is at least Log Cabin Republican.
Tubby was in a painfully trendy store looking for not-ridiculously-short skirts. Whenever we thought we saw a skirt that was of a decent length, it turned out to be a really short dress.
20.12.09
From earlier this month.
"This doesn't exist!" I exclaimed, gripping onto the package in disbelief. The gum was strawberry and lime from a familiar brand, but in a flavour I'd never seen before, but suddenly desired. It was nearing midnight on a Sunday and Tubby and I were in the biggest of big-box stores somewhere off the highway in Oregon. Despite being the middle of the night, small, sleep-deprived children still wandered the store with their parents, as employees broke down shipping palettes in the aisles and re-stocked the shelves.
We'd spent the day driving, and after finding a late dinner, we debated whether to go sleep at the hotel, or go shopping right then and there. In keeping with the spirit of the excursion, we hit the daylight fluorescent glamour of 24hr shopping.
For me, at least, this is uncharacteristic. I'm a difficult shopper. I'm resistant to overt branding. I like buying local. If I go out, I'm probably carrying at least one reusable bag. I survived working in retail. And I'm picky. So a multi-day excursion to the Home of the Brave for the (almost) sole purpose of the material consumption of goods was an exotic and unprecedented vacation*.
And so I found myself in the twilight zone, encountering products eerily similar, yet fundamentally different from the things I was used to. Sizes were shockingly large; store wayfinding was subtitled in Spanish; prepared foods were varied, widely available, and inexplicably cheap. I wasn't in Kansas anymore, then again maybe I was closer to Kansas than I was to home, and we had just begun.
*Similar road trips during childhood usually involved National Parks as destinations, with stops for historical monuments, and gosh darned it if we weren't on the road by 9am every day and at our destination in time for dinner at a reasonable hour.
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