On the rocks

After Karen and Reid came home from shopping and we'd made dinner, we realized that we had no salt or pepper. The corn on the cob was a little bland.

Since we'll have several other meals here we decided that we needed to get some salt and pepper. And ice. The water tastes different than we're used to and we can't quite get the tap to get very cold.

We drew straws, so to speak, to see who would run down to the corner store to buy the forgotten groceries. Andrew and I won, so we got some pocket money from Karen and left Rachel in her care while we took a sunset walk down the street.

The area we are in reminds us a lot of Italy. The houses are Italian-esque, the streets have Italian names, and the corner store was run by a man who looks and sounds suspiciously Italian. There are also a few pizzerias around that we want to check out.

The store was small and crowded with aisles. The food was labeled in multiple languages, including Arabic, Italian, English, and Spanish. We really felt like we should have been speaking a foreign language in some strange country.

After wandering around and noticing that half the store was stocked with alcohol--quite the shock for us Utahans!--we stuck to the other half of the store. We eventually found those cute little cardboard salt and pepper shakers, and then grabbed some ice and got in line.

Everyone else seemed to be buying alcohol.

We put our salt, pepper, and ice on the counter.

The lady in line behind us, who we were sure was pretty well hammered already and was buying more alcohol, said, "Salt, pepper, and ice? Does that even work?"

"Uh, yeah..." said Andrew, "We're hungry."

"You guys are pretty hard core," she said.

"Yeah, we're branching out," I said.

She laughed at us, as did half the store. That's okay. We enjoyed our virgin salt and pepper on the rocks.