Exactly one month from today, I am going to go to the country everyone hates to love (or loves to hate) - The United States of America. Yes, I am going to be one of those Indians.
Over the past couple of years, I have seen many close friends and family (my sister, Kitty Kate) go off to the States, ostensibly to study but really, to start a whole new life there. Before they all left (weirdly enough, they all left the same year, within a few months of each other), I recall one evening when KK (my sister) and a friend (Mr. Prissy Pants) were hanging out in our apartment, talking about what it was that we were looking forward to about the States. All of us came to one unanimous subject - the food.
Now, I know this sounds odd. After all, we all know that American food is hardly of the Cordon bleu variety. When I told Veronica about this, she wrinkled up her pert little nose and said "My country has the shittiest food in the world - everyone knows American food sucks!"
I suppose our fascination with American food comes more from Hollywood than from actual experience. I always wondered, for example, how it would feel to casually eat out of those oh-so-hip Chinese take-out boxes. Hollywood stars always handle their chopsticks with such panache.
The other thing me and my friends ached to do, was to eat one of those "floppy pizzas" (as we termed them). You know the kind - the ones that are so huge and thin that they flop over when you pick them up (think Joey in Friends). And we had to do the bucket-of-ice-cream-in-front-of-the-TV-thing. I love how these svelte, gorgeous women casually open their gigantic freezers and take out a generous bucket of ice-cream (they would never scoop it out, oh no), settle into a couch and eat it with an absent-minded, languorous air (spoon poised tantalizingly mid-air). Sheer heaven (and envy)!
The final thing-to-do on our agenda, was to buy a hot-dog from a hot-dog stand. This was the only thing I didn't do last summer (when I visited my sis). But hey - there's always this summer. Which brings me back to the start. Summer. Ice-cream. Hot-dogs. Floppy pizzas. And its all only a month away.
