Pittsburgh and Potatoes

Hello again. I’m back. For now. 

I stopped blogging because I ran out of things to write about. The upside of not taking many risks and not traveling much is a fairly stress-free and safe life. The downside is that you don’t have anything interesting to write on a blog about yourself. I briefly considered doing book reviews and stuff like that - but I think there are enough better qualified people out there who are already doing that. 

Another reason for my silence is some major changes in my lifestyle and beliefs. I am now a vegan and an atheist. Both changes happened gradually and were challenging in different ways. I might talk about them in future posts, but the purpose of this post is something else. I’m interning at CMU this summer. It’s day two of my trip and I already have anecdotes to share. 

I write this post from my room in an attic in Pittsburgh. It just stopped raining, and the cool breeze from the window next to me carries in the scent of wet grass and the sounds of birdsong and cars on the highway. The rain is a welcome relief after yesterday’s sweltering heat. When you travel from a tropical country to a temperate one, it’s pretty disappointing to find that your room at home was cooler. 

Now that we’ve broken the ice with the weather, let’s move onto something more fun: potatoes. If you want potatoes in good old India, you walk into any grocery store and pick up a bag of those lovely, dusty, round brown tubers and the matter ends there. But it’s not that simple here. 

I went grocery shopping yesterday. I walked into a Giant Eagle ( a popular grocery store chain), pulled out a shopping cart which was a little too big for me to comfortably control, and I manoeuvred it to the vegetable aisle (I’m vegan and I love vegetables. Where else would I go first?) -  except that there was no single vegetable aisle. They had organic,regular, hydroponic, diced,frozen, salads and combos and to make things worse - every vegetable had a description with the nutrition content and the dishes  it could be used in.  My brain was overloaded with information - did I pick the cheapest, the healthiest, the local stuff? So much for completing a four credit course on optimization. Close to panic, I ran to the one vegetable that had never failed me: the potato. But to my absolute horror-they had a potato aisle. ‘Et tu, Potato?’ I cried in my head. They had at least five different varieties of potato! Russet, Idaho, Restaurant (because restaurants are too cool to use the potatoes that we commoners use?), Golden and a couple of others whose names I forget. After staring in confusion for a couple of minutes, I ran for it. The rest of the products were equally bad - bread (had they never heard of a regular sized loaf?!), jam and even sugar. I was grateful to be vegan - it was a foolproof way to eliminate a lot of options. I began to appreciate how long it must have taken my parents to come up with the grocery list we use at home. The thought of my parents in their twenties cheered me up a little and I rolled on.

At some point I got used to the variety and started to enjoy myself. The upside was that they had something to cater to everybody’s requirements. If you knew what you wanted, you could find it. I found a vegan yogurt substitute (vanilla flavoured Almond-milk yogurt is delicious, by the way) ,a vegan version of Nutella (hurrah for hazelnuts and chocolate!) and (I haven’t tried it yet) -  dairy free ice cream! I was so distracted by all the choices and the colours that even though I walked out with a bag so heavy I could barely lift it - I had forgotten to buy salt and sugar!

And that was my first trip to the grocery store.

P.S. I went to the Indian store today. And yes, they had just one kind of potato. Who would have thought that potatoes could make me so nostalgic for my home country?