Today, I ate something green.
So far, I have noticed that there are not a lot of restaurants that serve cheap fruits and veggies around here. There are pubs that offer $10 steaks on Friday nights. And kebabs stands. Pad Thai. More pubs. Fish and chips. Meat pies. Tandoori take-out. Pizza places (none of which sell by the slice.) A most excellent German bakery where I got a divine apple bake in a pastry that really did honestly melt in my mouth. But little fresh food.
My first night here I did find a Thai place that served up a delicious chicken and vegetable stir fry and cost $20. (Compare to $12 for the same dish at Thai Smile, three blocks from where I lived in Rancho Mirage.) At that point, I had been up for 36 hours or so and didn’t much care. I needed green things. But the cheap food is, as usual, the food that’s bad for you.
I looked in vain for a grocery store. Finally, I stopped in a convenience store and asked if there was a place to find a greater variety of grocery items. I understood one word that the young man with a heavy Asian/Australian accent said: “Woolworths.” I sighed. Where I grew up, Woolworths was a drugstore lunch counter kind of place. I didn’t want more diner food – I wanted an apple.
For four days I subsisted on a variety of food guaranteed to hurt me: fish and chips down at Circular Quay, right on Sydney Harbor. An egg and bacon roll on Darlinghurst Road. Latte (not even decaff – yikes) with sugar paired with a blueberry muffin at G’Day Café. And turns out that I’ve developed a six-dollar-a-day chocolate habit. (That’s like smoking a pack a day! Geez.)And my running shoes haven’t yet made an appearance outside my suitcase.
Tonight on my way back from the Internet café, I noticed a sandwich board sign on the sidewalk pointing down a side street – “Adora Health Foods.” Hallelujah! Maybe they have something that I can eat that isn’t in the “shit that will kill me” food group. The place was barely big enough to turn around in, but had shelves to the ceiling of supplements I recognized.
And fair trade chocolate.
So the only thing I left with was a $5.90 Cocolo dark chocolate bar with almonds. I can recommend this as a complete meal. Almonds are now defined as a superfood, as is dark chocolate. And chocolate is derived from a bean, so it’s a vegetable. Perfect.
I tucked the bar in my messenger bag, strolled back to MacleayStreet and turned toward the hotel. The late afternoon sun was warm, the breeze was just turning cool, and I could hear faint music from an open terrace door. I was just about to walk into the hotel when shopping carts across the street caught my eye. The store: Woolworth’s. I crossed the street and looked through the windows of what appeared to be a grocery store. Sure enough, I saw men, women and children of all ages perusing veggies, loading up fruits and canned goods … Woolworth’s is a grocery store.
Well, shit.
Off I went to find something green to flesh out my currently vegetarian repast. I found a ready-made Caesar salad, complete with child-sized plastic fork.
Back at the hotel, I peel the container open – chicken and croutons and cheese and bacon bits each in its own little packet. I pick up the chicken packet. I pull. I tear. I use my teeth. No luck.
Anyone who has traveled (or been alive) since 9/11 knows that it is now impossible to travel with a sharp object. After one long-ass day of travel, my little manicure scissors was finally confiscated by a team of crack security agents at the Brisbane airport (after the security agent at LAX walked me back out because I had forgotten to empty my water bottle, after I had spent an hour getting through Customs in Brisbane, after paying $20 cab fare to go 2 kilometers from the International terminal to the Domestic terminal because my flight was boarding in 15 minutes and I still had to check in and go through security…) I could not open the packets to make my salad. But women’s cosmetic bags usually have more than one implement that can be used to poke someone’s eye out or take hostages. My tweezers was nearly confiscated by the same alert Brisbane security agents until I begged amnesty, vowing I would threaten nothing but my own eyebrows with them.
Yes, tweezers can poke a hole in hermetically sealed chicken packets. And bacon bit/parmesan/crouton packets. And I ate something green today.