Eat Them Both

What a day. At some later time I will fill you in on the lump of beaurocratic coal that was left in my proverbial stocking, but for now I will enter the first post of actual travel-survival information thus far. After all, that is ostensibly why I began this, right?

It has taken me a long time to unabashedly claim "I love McDonalds chicken nuggets." It's not that the love of them is new--no, no, a long torrid affair is ours, begun in the Cox Creek Parkway location in Florence, Alabama during multiple trips following Granny's hair appointments on Thursdays. My family was not wealthy, and Granny usually only had coupons for beef-based delicacies, so chicken nuggets and I could only rendevous occassionally. Not much, however, could make me happier on a summer afternoon than relentlessly dunking fried bits of processed chicken lips into thinly-veiled high fructose corn syrup called "Sweet n' Sour Sauce." (Little tip: If a product is marketed using an apostrophe in the name, it does not contain natural elements. This pretty much holds up in all countries.)

This love was okay to bring out in middle school as "nostalgia" for that "kids' stuff" we were all too cool to like.  In high school we (or most of my friends) were paying off cars, so unless it was, like, a birthday, or we were celebrating all "Superiors" at Trumbauer, chicken nuggets and I had to stay only marginally acquainted. But it was in college that the trist became seen as sordid.  I attended a private, Christian university. These kids went on mission trips to places that eat guinea pigs. Saying that I liked chicken nuggets was tantamount to backing Manifest Destiny and stepping on puppies. That was if the kids were hard-core. If they were average non-America-ashamed individuals, nuggets were simply a waste of resources that could be spent on gas money to the movies. 

So, naturally, when I went to Europe after my junior year of college, I proudly strutted by each McDonalds, eschewing the familiarity in favor of pate' sandwiches with butter. I tried every anchovie-laced-anise-based-curry-dipped-Nutella-bombed unpronoucible thing I could. And my sad secret was, I missed home. And even more sadly I discovered, sometimes that loneliness could be allieviated by something familiar...familar and fried.

It has taken until the last few months touring Australia with my new husband, in our new caravan, in new places, with new food, new friends, (etc, ad nauseum) to come to the conclusion that in any new situation, what you need is not "immersion in culture" it's "balance of stimuli." For me, I enjoyed a superb Himalayan goat curry in Victoria Park, Perth, and yet nearly jumped out of my skin to get a real Reese's Peanut Butter Cup in an IGA in Toodjay. One familiar, one including actual goat bones, both amazing.

So that's it.  That's my advice. Eat them both. Be curious and proud of your home town. Be fearless and reverent. Be present and past. If everyone in each town you visited thought that their hometown had nothing to offer, then Pisa would just be a bad corporate real estate investment.

For those of you Stateside, eat a nugget for me; for those of you in Oz, if you get the goat curry, add the lamb momos. They're delish.