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Location: Cambridge, MA
Last week, I drove down to Boston to check out the business and government schools at Harvard and see if that’s a place I could live.
First off, Boston and Cambridge are urban. Obvious enough, right? And I consider myself adaptable enough and possibly urban inclined, but my visit impressed upon me how country I have become. When I thought about it, I haven’t lived in a city of more than 15,000 since I left Minnesota nearly seven years ago. More often, I’ve lived in towns of 800 people (Geilo), 5000 people (Fort Kent), or Jericho Center (people?).
My mission Thursday morning was to find soy milk for my cereal. I had brought cereal with me, and some granola bars, but because I’m don’t handle dairy products well, I needed soy milk, my substitute. I figured that in a yuppie city like Cambridge, this would be an easy mission to accomplish. It turned out dead wrong.
First, I took my friend’s recommendation and tried out the 7-11 on the corner a few blocks away. The only thing I could procure there were two dangerously under-ripe bananas. Hammer-like. Green as grass. No soy. The store attendant recommended a local café.
The café was a few blocks away. Not too far, I figured. The café seemed yuppie enough. Little pastries with foreign sounding names and equally confusing terminology for its coffee menu. But no soy milk. He recommended another place.
The next café was really hopping. Lots of people. Lots of yuppies from MIT, which surrounded it. No soy milk. Where do these people get their soy milk?!
Disappointed, I stood in the middle of a city, millions of people in the adjacent square miles, yet no soy milk. No grocery store.
I walked in another direction to a main street. I stopped in at a dozen little eatery shops. One, a breakfast establishment. The woman didn’t know what soy milk was. Another, a cake and cookie café. No soy milk. Why would we carry that? Umm, because the majority of people in this country who don’t have the gene that causing the stomach to produce a sufficient amount of lipase to digest milk proteins might want something other than milk to drink with all of your trans-fat-infused cookies and cakes! I tried an African grocery story just for fun. They had plantain milk; but they were out. More coffee shops and cafes. Don’t you even have some for people to put in their coffees, lattes, mocha-cappuccinos, or mocha-hiitos, or whatever they’re called now? Nope.
Maybe I should try Seattle. Well, at least Boulder and San Francisco are the cities next up on my graduate school tour…
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