So I was all excited about no-bake cookie recipes… then I realized they almost all call for peanut butter, which is basically an import food item here. Oops.
It’s the little things that get you. Why isn’t this milk refrigerated, you wonder: and then you see that it’s sterilized, and that the refrigerated kind has only been microfiltered. You see a pay phone and try to find a slot that accepts coins, but there isn’t one: pay phones only accept cards here. You consult your map and see that your destination is almost due north, but you can’t find it because you keep running into dead ends and you can’t orient yourself.
But at the same time, you don’t want to miss home too much, because you’re a continent and an ocean away from where you were born, and this is supposed to be an adventure. So you stroll and you wander, a little more alert than you’d be at home… but you live in a suburb, and there’s not much to see. You wonder if you’ll ever make it here. You wonder if you’ll ever feel like you belong in this city, just a little bit.