Since I've already brought up the store, I'll say that there's a big selection of juices and ice cream here, and there are even “not from concentrate” juices. They taste good, I especially like the Simply Grapefruit brand. They're not cheap for us, but for the locals they're tolerable – about 4 dollars for 2 liters. Ice cream costs 5 bucks for 1.42 liters. They often have sales where it's basically half off. And it's worded trickily - “Buy one get one free”. In reality you can buy just one, the price will simply be half.
Soda at restaurants comes from fountains: they make it on the fly by adding syrup to tap water. It tastes unpleasant, absolutely reeks of bleach. And in the store popular sodas are expensive, around 1.7 dollars for two liters. Or 65 cents for a can from a machine – I buy those sometimes. Also at work there's a so-called Vending Machine, meaning a machine selling chips, cookies, and chocolate. A buggy device – it doesn't dispense some items, so you end up having to scarf down all sorts of peanut butter, meaning nut paste. That, by the way, is very popular traditional American crap – give it a try if you get the chance.
I also checked out a local soda brand here that's been made since 1917 – Cheerwine. Wasn't impressed – it's similar to Dr. Pepper, which I'm not a fan of. A colleague drinks a flavored low-calorie water under the SOBE Lifewater brand – this one's a bit nicer. All in all, soda sucks, juices rule.
As for ice cream, I already wrote about this on Twitter, but I'll repeat it: we usually buy Bryers. Funny enough, it's made by that same “toiletries” megacorporation Unilever with a $40 billion turnover, meaning the maker of “Lipton” tea, “Brooke Bond”, soap, and many other products.
Here's a list for you, so you don't get too comfortable.
The most famous ones:
As it turns out, Unilever is the biggest ice cream manufacturer in the world. Apparently, unlike with their tea, here it affected the quality positively – the ice cream is tasty. Then again, there's probably no such thing as completely bad-tasting ice cream in America. The best one – the one I bought at the start – cherry with chocolate chips. Too bad everything that's fancy is artificial – all natural (as they call the stuff without any additives here) is only plain vanilla or chocolate.
Unilever, nonetheless, is a typical megacorporation, – exploits child labor, dumps mercury onto beaches, and cuts down rainforests.
As for eateries, we go to them for lunch quite often, I'm already sick of it. A Mexican restaurant, sandwiches/hamburgers/subs and that sort of stuff. By the way, I'm sick of Subway too – you can't figure out which ingredients to pick so that it actually tastes good. Besides, there are better subs – at a joint called Firehouse Subs, styled like a fire station.
Personally, I'd prefer sushi, but my colleagues don't get that sort of thing. The sushi, by the way, is best at Kanki, followed by Asuka, and the really simple stuff is at Little Tokyo.
Overall I'm already pretty tired of American food. Now I could happily chow down on something simple for a long time, the way I'm used to at home: rice, fried meat, and sliced cucumbers with tomatoes. There was a time when I wanted to try as many different things as possible, but now I've satisfied my curiosity. We recently had fish, by the way, at one eatery. So there they grill it over an open fire and serve it on a charred wooden plank. It's stylish and smells really delicious, but terribly wasteful – they ruin a plank for every customer.
In any case, if the weather is nice, I now go for a walk in the park, and I eat the fruit that I bring with me to work. Especially since every now and then all sorts of evil people bring in cookies, donuts, or even pizza, like today. At work, by the way, there are two microwaves – one with a grill, specifically for heating up pizza – in a regular one it gets a bit soggy.