American Hungry (Running out of options)

Our favorite restaurant has shut down. Before, if I wanted to lament the lack of decent food choices in town, I could afford to feel a little whimsy about it, but now I’m broken-hearted.

There are so many restaurants in Madison. We have four steakhouses in two blocks – Outback, Rafferty’s, Logan’s, Longhorn – this creates and illusion of choice and a reality of irritation.

And I understand now why it takes so long for the natives to agree on where to eat, why it’s so difficult to choose. Because you could have 20 good experiences at a restaurant, but if they get it wrong once, that’s it, you never want to go back.

I have some favorites, but mostly it’s like settling down to choose a movie on Netflix – is a choice of a thousand shitty movies (and Thor – I could watch Thor again) really a choice?

Steak ‘n’ Shake’s California Double Steakburger – a restaurant I don’t hate.

We become spoiled by familiarity, by security. I thought I had it figured out. For Mexican, we went to Las Cebollas. For “this is like a real night out and I’m going to wear a shirt with a collar” steak, we went to Longhorn (or rather, we let other people take us to Longhorn), for “getting home late and we don’t want to cook, and damn, I’m going to have a beer with this” Chinese we went to Panda Express. And then there are the extra-budget “I get the feeling  that someday something is going to go down at this place” options of Ryan’s and Steak ‘n’ Shake – my less than guilty pleasures that I love for the duration of the meal and then spend the rest of the day regretting.

There is the pretense at Italian food – the wide-eyed, cold-plated horror of the Olive Garden, and Fazoli’s, which has a menu and prices I’m tempted by but have been forbidden to enter. (It’s said that the food at Fazoli’s is like school dinners, but I liked school dinners).

And then there are the burgers, which I rarely buy but take seriously when I do.  I can enjoy breakfast at McDonalds but I couldn’t eat their burgers. I can love a #1 or, belt allowing, #2 at Sonic, but it has to be the right Sonic. Wendy‘s is great, but hey, is it really so great, or have I just turned it into something so mythical that it will inevitably disappoint? Checkers, oh dear, I will never go back to Checkers.

You don’t go to Burger King in Rivergate, even when you have coupons, because they will take forever and then give you the wrong order anyway, and so you will cut out the coupons but keep them in your car until they expire, and then throw them away, feeling like the worst victim of a zipcode lottery. The burgers help me understand why you can drive through a town with every fast-food place imaginable and still see nothing you want. And God forbid you’re sharing the ride with another adult – no one can agree, because we’ve all been burned by these nasty restaurant, because our tastebuds have broken, because we’re tired, and a little bit sickly, and already thinking about what we’ll do after dinner anyway, so why can’t we just have food injections instead?

When I arrived in Tennessee, the restaurants were a mysterious blur, and then I got to know them, and for a period of time that I can never get back, I loved them. Applebee’s, Chilli’s, O’Charley’s…I couldn’t fault them, mainly because there were so much more enjoyable than so many British restaurants – not so much for food quality, but just in the sense that they’re actually open and you can get parked.  But now I’m like the rest of us here, and I see the holes, and I feel ripped off even when the check is absurdly cheap, and the food is just not good, and I feel sorry for the staff, and most of all I wonder why, driving past, how all of these bad restaurants stay in business, why they’re so busy on a Monday night, and of course I know why – we’re just so damn lazy – and I look at restaurant customers and they’re not having a good time, this is nothing special, it’s not close to a treat – the only positive emotion on display is relief that we’re not at home, that there won’t be washing up.

In December we rolled up to Las Cebollas and the doors were locked and the lights were out. And now we’re screwed, because this was the one place we agreed on, the one place that was inexpensive but not nasty, where the staff were friendly but not cloying, where it seemed…authentic but that didn’t matter anyway, because I just know that Rebecca and I, we knew what we were going to have before we walked through the door, and we felt comfortable to have the best conversations of our American lives in that place. We worked things out in there.

And we’ll never know what happened to the owners, and I wonder if the staff are finding other jobs, and then I think, really? Were we that close? Were they on our Christmas card list? And this illusion of intimacy, of making a closed down business somehow about me, it’s one of the least endearing parts of my American assimilation.

So instead of the angst that I don’t deserve, we’ll look for a new place we can boast about (and if you don’t count the number of times we’re mentioned in the violent crime news stories on newschannel5.com we are so very low of things to boast about in Madison). We tried Las Fiestas for Mexican, but it didn’t come close. There’s Fat Juicy Taco, which is special in a different way, but that’s in Hendersonville.  So the search goes on for a lazy-meal restaurant, for the place to go for dinner that costs under $30 for our big/little night out – or we face the alternative; flying back to Edinburgh once a week for a smoked sausage supper. And to be honest, I doubt anything we find here will ever come close to that level of raw indulgence.

Conversations with Americans Pt.5 (Good Questions)

Image via Wikipedia

I still talk to Americans. More impressively, they still talk to me.

Granted, Americans will speak to anyone, but following previous discoveries, I know that Americans have more to talk about than just food and where to find it. They are a curious people. They have questions and they’re looking for answers.

I just wish I had some.

Finding Refuge (a break from the wild life)

I’ve been getting away from it all. And when I say all, I mean the grind and flash that I’ve come to associate with my American life.

During our visit to Virginia we are mooching off staying with friends in Woodbridge, a town lucky enough to host a square mile of land that is the Occoquan Bay Wildlife Refuge.

Armed with the bicycle brought with me from Tennessee, I have been paying a daily visit to the refuge; before breakfast, before the heat goes completely bananas. And it has opened up a wonderful and entirely new area of America for me to explore – the parts where there are hardly any people:

Driving in America Pt.2 (Death on Wheels)

There are cars on the road here that…should not be. These are the cars so smashed up and taped back together that you give them the amount of space deserving of someone with seemingly nothing to lose. I  always expect see a young punk behind the wheel of these cars, but as it turns out, driving a piece of crap can happen at any stage of life here in Tennessee. Because sometimes, you just need a car.

I bought my first car in America. It was 1995, and my 22-year-old self bought the kind of car that American guys want to buy when they’re 17 but their fathers won’t let them.

I didn’t have my father’s guidance when I bought this car. I’m not sure I even told him. He would have forbidden me to buy this car. And the thing is, between you and me, I really wanted a car.

Cars are American destiny. When you are here, cars will definitely happen. If you don’t like cars, go back to Russia. On the day I told a buddy that I needed to buy a car (and how much did a car cost? and how exactly did I do this?)  this car appeared for sale on the 10 minute walk between the hotel I was working and the post office.

The car cost $300, less than the bicycle I owned back in Scotland.

Things happen when you buy a $300 car, things best kept off the page. But for the record, I didn’t kill myself or anyone else with this car, because like most people, I was luckier than I deserved:

Driving in America Pt.1 (Mysterious love affair)

Last week we took a 7-hour road-trip with 2 hours notice. This kind of formula is alien to me. Before, I would’ve demanded a month of planning. I would’ve been Googling roadside attractions, Hampton Inn locations.

In those 2 hours between knowing about the journey and beginning it, I took the car for an oil change and found time to buy water wings at Wal-Mart (not for myself), while Rebecca spent her time packing up and finding baby-sitters for two nieces (they got the water wings – both sets identically pink and ruffled, because there sometimes just isn’t to subvert gender stereotypes) and packing up the two dogs that we were taking with us.

During the 7 hour journey, we passed an enormous, brilliantly lit crucifix, listened to some emotionally chilling talk radio, and passed through what I became convinced was the same strip of land a hundred times. Thank you, Illinois.

At the end of our journey, we picked up Rebecca’s mother, spent 10 minutes walking the dogs, and then took another 7-hour drive home.

This is the American car journey. It’s last-minute, it’s fickle, and it’s based on logic that does not stand up to any level of scrutiny. But when you’re here, you roll with it.

I roll, I roll a lot more than I suspect my American buddies give me credit for.

But this is taking some getting used to:

Conversations with Americans Pt 3: Once more with feeling

Sometimes I worry I’m not enthusiastic enough for America. Even though a day doesn’t go by here without me expressing joy about something (mostly it’ll be sitting on a shelf in Kroger), the people around me routinely check to see whether I’m having a good enough time.

Perhaps my tone is inadequate. After all, British people sound sarcastic to American ears, just as Americans sound… (wait for it…) a little over-eager to British ears. It’s something we have to get used to.

Is it my unwillingness to drink my milk and get on a horse? Do I need to master a different set of gestures and facial expressions to convey meaning?

That might help, but I think more important is the vocabulary. It may be my unwillingness to use the key American phrases employed to show enthusiasm:

What I like about you is…

So it’s been three glorious months in the United States. And somehow, despite my staggering foreignness, I have not been kicked out, thrown in jail, or even spat at in the street.

I think this is because I can match (and sometimes surpass) the American enthusiasm for Things We Didn’t Know We Needed. I’ll admit that I spent quality time last week opting Rebecca and myself out of marketing lists for our email, phone and postal addresses – but I do delight in coming across the new and exotic:

Saving the world (or not – we’re fine with that as well)

It’s not easy being green. And frog or not, it’s next to impossible to be green in Springfield, Tennessee.

Attending Nashville’s Earth Day event just two weeks after our arrival in Tennessee gave me a taste of how it could be here. Expecting very little, I was impressed and delighted by the diversity and enthusiasm on display. There is so much good work going on in terms of community food, conservation, recycling, mass transit etc. But none of this has made it into the mainstream yet.

Once Americans are sold an idea, like wireless everything or hand sanitizer they embrace it with zeal. But it can be a hard sell, and the concept of “choice” is so hard-wired that nothing must appear forced. I’m seeing far more innovation in the form of a 28th flavor of Pop Tart or yet one more way to consume cheese than a genuine way to save energy or reduce waste.

There are bigger problems we could have, but moving from a small Scottish town that was fully signed up to things such as  curbside recycling, free compost bins, a frequent bus service, to a much bigger American town which doesn’t offer any of these things? It’s a tough transition, but I’m doing my best to avoid turning my carbon footprint into a colossal crater.

Conversations with America Pt.1 (Winning and losing)

Image by bishib70 via Flickr

I was told way back when (1993) that there are taboo subjects in American conversation that I shouldn’t bring up. These subjects neatly coincided with the things I most wanted to talk about, so I found myself pretty quiet in America. Until I discovered shuffleboard, Twinkies and The Simpsons, and was officially declared safe to talk with.

In my new permanent resident guise, I have yet to have any taboo conversations with an American. So absent are these subjects from the typical conversation that most of the time I don’t notice we’re not talking about them. And yet if we turn on the news, they’re pretty much all there.

Most of the conversations I have, and are present for, with family members and friends in the US are blandly competitive; there is a tacitly understood angle that any conversation is batted up in the big blue sky to be caught, run with, and won. These issues are quick and easy wins, as they center around the everyday subjects you learn to speak first when learning a new language: how much, where can I, why didn’t you etc.

Unwritten rules pt. 2 (The stuff you don’t pay for…probably)

(sorta kinda)

America continues to tolerate me. I think for the first few weeks she’s indulging me, because I do have some cute puppy-dog aspects, but soon I will need to shape up or ship out. I will have to uncover and abide by the unwritten, unspoken rules of conduct.

I covered my difficulty with financial transactions last time. But what about the rules for the things that don’t require a debit card?

As a Scot, am I inevitably more comfortable negotiating the few aspects of American life that I don’t have to open my wallet for? Let’s take for example tennis courts and public libraries: