Lunch O' Champions! Good eats at 7-11

Emmerson enjoying her "big" gulp. Any true blooded US person would scoff at this puny imitation but its the large size (thank goodness).  I can not say American any more when I mean the US because I am around lots of Americans who are not USians and it doth offend....

Something to say about familiarity - today we hit up the 7-11. Even though their are more of the stores in Japan and the world wide franchises are run out of the Tokyo headquarters, it is very much a US institution. This morning, I whisked Ada off to a play date in the San Lorenzo housing community (more on that later), Alicia was off conducting a yoga class with the girls cross country team - so it was just Emmerson and I. She is pretty game at exploring and such but today she just wanted to eat a hotdog for lunch. We checked the eateries on the ground floor of my complex - UCC Cafe (Japanese), Apt B-1 (International), a bakery, a Euro - cafe, a wine-shop, and a Starbucks ... no hotdogs. So we left the complex but before crossing over to the mall to continue our hotdog hunt we decided to walk around the other Rockwell apartment complexes and see what they had to offer. As we passed by 7-11, I mentioned that they had hotdogs. Emmerson's eyes lit up and I realized - we were about to have lunch at 7-11 - too late to backtrack! Food snob I am not but I have not had a lunch at 7-11 or any convenient store for that matter since my Japan days when it was part of our post surfing ritual ... oden at 7-11. Strike that - since Honduras - but it wasn't lunch and that's a whole nother story ....

So I retrieved a 50 cent hotdog for Emmerson from the steamer box and then scanned the options for something I could get. There were two large crock pots of hardboiled eggs so I made my way to them for a closer look. I was curious as to why two ... bit of an explanatory tangent necessary here. One of the infamous foods of the Filipins is balut - a very unique form of hardboiled egg (fire up the google machine). It is very common street fare but I have yet to try one or even see one. So I was wondering if one of the pots was balut and the other regular. I could have asked but thought it would be more interesting just to select one and see what happened. It turned out to be a regular old hardboiled egg, which is good as I was not in the mood for my first go at balut. Next time, when feeling a bit more balut worthy, I will draw from the other egg pot.

Food selected and paid for, we saddled up to a window seat to enjoy our "comfort food". But at least their was a bit of adventure - when I asked for ketchup they gave me not only ketchup but a mysterious green packet of "Manhattan Sauce" .... exciting indeed! It turned out to be whatever you call that mayo and mustard concoction. We did not partake.

The exciting Manhattan Sauce!