Notes on the Hood

I wanted to buy water and the toiletries (deodorant, shampoo, and toothpaste) which I omitted to take along in the flight, but there is a dismal lack of the generous Turkish grocery stores that I know from Berlin. One of my roommates (more about them later) pointed me to "Bravo," which was supposedly at the street corner, but either it is the shop that is closed, or I was looking at the wrong street corner. So I walked down a little, and someone actually asked me for directions! so I must have looked like I belong in the scene! but I couldn't tell him, of course, and he went on his way. In the meantime the cars were honking merrily away, either because the driver was impatient or recognized someone he knew.

I made up my mind to go to a KFC store at the intersection. I had read before that poorer people in the cities have no choice but to buy unhealthy food, because it is what they can afford and because it is what is available. Here is more empirical evidence. The store sold no water, only Pepsi and Diet Pepsi and Cola and Mountain Dew. Out of an impulse for which I (metaphorically speaking) kicked myself later, as I generally refuse to sacrifice taste to calorie-counts, I ordered a diet pepsi. With a small box of popcorn chicken, it cost $3.88. The pepsi was mostly ice cubes and tasted of the plastic container in which it was presumably kept, and the popcorn chicken, in a box that was small indeed, tasted more of chicken grease than of the miserable little snippets of meat that they contained. To guard against hold-ups, the cashiers and cooks were behind a glass wall interrupted only by the two little swivelling boxes in which they deposited the food and change, and received the money. I don't regret going to the store, because I needed substantial food of some sort, and of course gathered information, but I do think that the large proportion of ice, which I presume to be company policy as the cashier herself was friendly and competent, is only one instance of egregious exploitation by a major corporation. There are charts that list the number of calories (multitudinous! I think mine contained 800!) in each dish, but they are not going to solve much of anything.

My hostel is incidentally guarded against break-ins, too. There is a keypad on the door, and one has to type in a code to enter. There is also a doorbell, but I'm not going to use it anymore because not knowing who is at the door when they have to answer it probably does make the hostel staff nervous. As for my roommates, they are all girls (I chose an all-female dorm as I do not like the charged dynamic that the mixed rooms tend to have). There is one girl, T***, who was strenuously trying to sleep, from behind a makeshift curtain of towels, when I arrived yesterday evening. She has an army of hair care products, a clothes-iron, clothing, a bathrobe, food (crackers, water, Coke), a big and much scuffed orange backpack, huddled in a range around her bunkbed (both of whose levels she has taken as her own) and on top of the mantel of the apparently defunct fireplace. On many of them she has scrawled her name in bold letters, which is why I know it. Then there is W***, an abrupt and irritable but not bad-hearted student(?) who is shortish, wears glasses, and has her blackish hair in a bob; she has a single bed in a niche to herself. So far I have only asked her whether everyone could use the coat-hangers on the rack (we can), and she has asked me whether I'm Nellie (I'm not). Thirdly, there is a girl who woke me up last night by saying "Who is that?" (repeatedly) in the direction of my semi-slumbering form, and then inquired, upon seeing that I was awake, if I was too cold without a blanket. She may be the one who has a book by some entity named Osho lying on the grey carpet and a hair-curler reposing at its ease on a low table, and who altogether scatters about her belongings more than W*** or me but not nearly so much as T***. What I suspect is that at least one of these girls is a student, staying at the hostel in the long term as a cost-cutting measure.