H.E.B.

It stands for Here Everything's Better. I think it's the stupidest name ever for a grocery store (reminds me of B.C., Best Choice, Pizza in Evart), but hey, I would shop at a store called Dead Puppies if they had a large selection of food and organics... and no actual dead puppies. And this place has that (selection and organics, I mean, not the dead puppies), so I think we found our grocery store! This is a major accomplishment. In Appleton we couldn't find a grocery store. There was a Piggly Wiggly, which was super-crappy and didn't even seem totally sanitary... shocking with a name like Piggly Wiggly. Then there was Copps, which was clean and big but shockingly disorganized and had nothing organic. Woodman's was like the local equivalent of Wal-Mart. Festival was pretty nice, but 25 minutes away from our apartment. Seriously, I think we went to each of these grocery stores once and didn't go back. Then we moved to Ludington and the choices were Meijer and Wal-Mart, so we chose Meijer, which I like, but it was like baby-sized. Seriously. Our meat choices were (old) steak, (old) chicken, and (old) bacon. It was such a struggle - you don't realize how important a good grocery store is until you don't have one! So finding HEB here in Houston is really exciting. It has the feel of Whole Foods but not the insane prices. It's big and bright with tons of beautiful produce and seafood cases and organic garlic and everything I want in a grocery store. They also make a ton of cool breads there, which is exciting because I kind of love anything home-made-y that I can just buy without making myself.

Yesterday we found a big produce market to the south where I think the Mexican vendors gave me a deal for speaking Spanish to them, and a bakery called El Bolillo. I think the technical translation for bolillo is a white bread roll, but it's also a slang term for a white person in Spanish. Needless to say, I will shop at that bakery forever because I think it's so funny to be the only white person in a place that's basically called White Person.