Ladies and Gentlemen! Progress is happening right before our very eyes!

For lunch today I made grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. The soup was as close to Campbell's style that I could do out here; it wasn't bad. I made the sandwiches with this bread I have been buying since I've moved in to my apartment- it's basically just sliced Challah. When I lived at Tamara's, I very rarely shopped for my own food because the few times I had bought something in town, Tamara always was quick to point out that what I bought was wrong, or I bought it at the wrong place, or paid too much, or it wasn't fresh enough because the store vendors didn't know me like they knew her. Being a foreigner, living with a host family, I was constantly being told that I didn't understand how to do basic things such as buy cheese, and that they, the host country nationals, knew not only how to do it better, but correctly, and therefor, I should never have even tried. So, other than exotic foods (peanut butter, soy sauce) from Chisinau that Tamara couldn't criticize because she didn't understand, I stopped trying to buy anything for myself other than cereal.

Living alone, I obviously started to shop for myself (though not all the time- Tamara still buys produce for me at the market so I don't have to wake up early and deal with all the grouchy, fat old broads who will bulldoze you to get to the cucumber stand FIRST. I then pay Tamara back.) Shopping for myself isn't that much more exciting than having someone do it for me, but it gives me reason to get out more, plus I get to be an integrated person in town. I don't know if I've written about this before, but the moment I knew I was "in" was when I was at one of the stores I frequent the most, and I asked the lady behind the counter for the yogurt. She simply shook her head no, to imply that I don't want that yogurt, because it's been there for a while, and I'm a regular now, so she'll tell me that. I almost hopped over the counter to hug her; my heart was aflutter! No longer did I need Tamara to buy the freshest foods for me, I now had store-ladies looking out for me too!

I was over at Tamara's (everyday) and we were eating soup with bread. I noticed Tamara had also started to buy the sliced bread I enjoy. When I lived with her, it was always the loaf that I never could cut into even enough slices, with some pieces extraordinarily thick and others thin, ripped in half as result of poor direction. I asked Tamara "Oh! So you're buying this bread now too? I love it!" She said, "Oh yea, it's so much easier." I then asked her why she never bought it when I lived with her. She responded that the stores only recently started carrying it. THE STORES, JUST THIS SUMMER, STARTING TO SELL SLICED BREAD.

"The best thing since sliced bread" has become so common in our English lexicon that I doubt most people think about what that implies. It implies a past world of bread unsliced. Oh sure, now anyone can get their artisan million-wheat nut-grain bread unsliced at any Whole Foods, but imagine, really, your childhood with unsliced Wonderbread. You can't! Sliced bread in the west is just a given. It's almost 2008, and in my town, they JUST STARTED selling sliced bread. People, this is serious progress!

I'd like to imagine that my being here had something to do with this. "Oh! An American moved to town! They like their bread sliced over there! Quick, fill in an order for sliced bread- STAT!" I think like this often, actually, like when I was out of town for two weeks and came home to find out that there hadn't been water in the apartment building at all in those two weeks. Tamara told me not to get too hopeful that there would be water anytime soon, but that night, the water miraculously turned back on. "What? The American is already back from her vacation!? Get that water on PRONTO! We need to keep her comfortable here, hurry with that water!" My downstairs neighbors also just installed a sensor light in our stairwell, which is super dark at nighttime otherwise. "Did you hear? That American is living on the second floor!" "You don't say! Well we sure can't have her walking up these stairs in the dark!" "You're right! Let's install a light immediately for her safety and well-being, bless her heart." It all seems pretty plausible to me, really. I mean, how else could one explain the appearance of Mozzarella and curry powder in town in the same week. Coincidence? I think not, but rather, a happy conspiracy.