Thing We Learned in Buenos Aires #1

I'm throwing this in early because Liz and Eriks have each covered it in their own way in their own blogs (see links to the right) and I fear there would be great imbalance if my own take on the events was not thrown into the ring.

This is an account of our first major lesson in Grocery Shopping 101, as told to mother and boyfriend in an email last month:

Dear Mommy and Mel,

It seems that in Argentina they have a thing for putting milk in their juice, which we discovered last week when we bought orange juice and it came out milky and similar to melted cremesicle.

A day or two later, Eriks went to buy milk and found that it's difficult to find in a normal jug. You have to have it in either the boxes of it that sit on the shelf unrefrigerated, which wasn't so strange as we've seen plenty in Europe, or you have to have it in a bag. BAGS OF MILK! It doesn't even make sense! How do you close it?? Who is drinking that much milk all at once? And they sit in the bottom bin like sad sacks of weirdness. Luckily Eriks did find a normal 1/2 gallon of milk, only it apparently was so thick that by the end of his meal of cereal he said "Well, I guess the next time I want milk I may as well just buy yogurt."

This morning was the best, though. Liz woke up feeling inclined to make us all French toast. When she came back from the store, she brought with her a box of apple juice, as she couldn't find any orange sans milk. She assured us all that she had spent a ridiculous amount of time making sure that she was, in fact, buying juice.
Except it wasn't apple juice.
It was apple juice flavored milk. Not even apple juice with milk. Milk with apple juice.
And while it did smell like apple juice, and it did look like milk (which is all weird enough,) it tasted like apple candy.
And just to make sure that we got as much nutrition as possible, it included fish oil for our daily dose of Omega-3.
So now we call it several combinations of apple/milk/juice/fish, the last and grossest being apple flavored fish milk.
Gross.

The end.

I honestly can't explain the sheer panic I feel when I think to myself "man, I could really go for some orange juice right now."


Update, October 14:

I went on a quest for milk and failed as miserably as the other two.

After what felt like hours staring at all of the boxes and baggies, trying to decipher which was yogurt-like, which had fruit and/or fish, etcetera, I decided upon the most non-threatening one in the whole milk area. It said "Infantil" and had a picture of Mickey Mouse. It boasted that it was fortified with extra calcium, vitamin C, and other things that would help a growing girl. How could I possibly be going wrong here?

I was going wrong here.

I got the bag home, poured it into a pitcher (Ah ha! Those milk bags are a pitcher-selling racket!) and took a sip. Mickey, that squeaky rodent, betrayed me. This was the sweetest milk I'd ever tasted! It was much like the leftover milk in a bowl of Frosted Flakes, except minus the Frosted Flakes. I'd be lying if I said that particular leftover milk is not totally delicious, but generally speaking I don't think bracing oneself for an oncoming sugar coma is the best way to start out a day.

As it turns out, the next ingredient after "leche" on the back of the bag is indeed "azucar," which means that until that damn pitcher is gone I'll have to limit my daily milk intake to four tablespoons, unless all my plans change and I feel like gaining 20 pounds and sprawling comatose on our couch for the rest of my time here.

Or, you know, I could throw it out. Oh dad, I know. Waste not, want not. I still don't know exactly what that means, but I guess I'm gonna drink the milk.

Sigh.