Since I brought up the store, I'll say that they have a big selection of juices and ice cream here, and there are even juices “not from concentrate.” 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 bucks for 2 liters. Ice cream costs 5 bucks for 1.42 liters. They often have sales where it's literally half price. And it's worded trickily - “Buy one get one free”. In reality, you can just buy one, the price will simply be halved.
Soda in restaurants comes from fountain machines: they make it on the fly by adding syrup to tap water. It tastes unpleasant, reeks terribly of bleach. But in the store, popular sodas are expensive, around 1.7 dollars for two liters. Or 65 cents for a can from a vending machine – I buy those sometimes. We also have a so-called Vending Machine at work, meaning a machine that sells chips, cookies, and chocolate bars. It's a buggy device – it refuses to dispense certain items, so you end up having to scarf down all sorts of peanut butter. This, by the way, is a very popular traditional American crap – give it a try if you ever get the chance.
I also checked out a local soda brand here that they've been making since 1917 – Cheerwine. I wasn't impressed – it's similar to Dr. Pepper, which I'm not a fan of. A colleague drinks flavored low-calorie water under the brand SOBE Lifewater – now that one is a bit nicer. Anyway, sodas suck, juices rule.
As for ice cream, I already wrote about this on Twitter, but I'll repeat myself: we usually buy Bryers. Funny enough, it's made by that same “toilet” megacorporation Unilever with a 40 billion $ turnover, meaning the manufacturer of “Lipton” tea, Brooke Bond”, soap, and many other products.
Here's a list for you, just so you don't get too relaxed.
The most famous ones:
As it turns out, Unilever is the largest ice cream manufacturer in the world. Apparently, unlike with their tea, this had a positive effect on the quality here – the ice cream is delicious. Then again, completely tasteless ice cream probably doesn't exist in America. The best one is the one I bought at the beginning – cherry with chocolate chips. It's a pity that everything fancy is unnatural – all natural (that's what they call stuff without any additives here) is only plain vanilla or chocolate.
Unilever, nevertheless, is a typical megacorporation, – it exploits child labor, dumps mercury on beaches, and cuts down rainforests.
As for food joints, we go to them for lunch pretty often, I'm sick of them already. A Mexican restaurant, sandwiches/hamburgers/subs and all that sort of thing. By the way, I'm sick of Subway too – you never know which ingredients to pick to make it taste good. Plus, there are better subs out there – at a place called Firehouse Subs, styled like a fire station.
Generally, I would prefer sushi, but my colleagues don't get that kind of stuff. The best sushi, by the way, is at Kanki, followed by Asuka, and the really basic stuff is at Little Tokyo.
Overall, I'm getting a bit tired of American food. Now I'm ready to just chow down on something simple for a long time, like 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 my curiosity is satisfied. We recently had fish, by the way, in one of these food joints. They grill it over an open fire there and serve it on a charred wooden plank. It's stylish and smells delicious, but terribly wasteful – they ruin a plank for every single customer.
In any case, if the weather is nice, I go for walks in the park now, and I eat fruits that I bring with me to work. Especially since periodically 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 reheating pizza – in a regular one it gets kind of soggy.