Who's Hungry?

For those of you curious on the matter, I encourage you to avoid planning on going anywhere via car in downtown Dubai the day the Tour of Dubai's prologue comes to town. Unless you want to sit in traffic and have no idea what's happening. Those cars are not moving, by the way.  And since comparison is fun, here's the same shot some seven hours later.  The 2014 race season is underway folks! I suppose it's been going on for a while now, but unlike the past two seasons where I started pinning on a number at the Tour of San Luis, I'm inaugurating this year with a Middle Eastern tour. Which is rather adventuresome since I don't know when I will be here otherwise. It's not exactly on many layovers I typically take anyway. (That said, Emirates Airlines is my new preferred airlines. They're as friendly as they are clean.)We had a 10km prologue, which went smoothly enough. I didn't win, chiefly because I left that honor to my countryman Taylor. I didn't have money on him, per se, but my bet was that Taylor would win and he didn't disappoint.Besides the ever increasing nerves of the authorities controlling the number of cars darting onto course during warm-up, the race itself was stunning. Big, beautiful, smooth roads, wide open corners to be taken at high speed, a good turnout of fans, and just a good day! Hello 2014.Let's cut to the chase and go to the heart of what this particular blog entry is all about: perusing foreign grocery stores. This is one of my favorite ways to explore a new country. As I touched upon yesterday with square donuts, globalization (and refrigeration) is a stark reality, and this exists in a grocery store as much as anywhere else. Let's begin with something excellent.Or Excellence, I should say.  Louisiana hot peppers bring this small bottle of pep to life! The fierce bald eagle instills fear in taste buds world wide and this hot sauce of Excellence clearly makes no exception. (Furthermore, with a little bit of research I learned that after a sharp decline, bald eagles are making a return to the Bayou State. You can report spotting said bird-of-prey here.)Continuing along this trail of spice, I reckon we're doing it all wrong in America. We have peanuts. We have nachos. But we do them separately. Why the heck haven't we created the nacho peanut?!  ...the new punchline to my favorite joke will be, "Nacho 'nuts!"Segueing to the next aisle while staying along the genre of peanuts, this is something special.  There was once a Garden of Eden, which is said to have been perfect in every possible way. Surely somewhere in the back hedges of that Garden was a tree that grew jars of peanut butter. Wow that would be fantastic.And to bring this segment to a close -- afterall, it was a brief stroll through the Towers Grocery Mart -- let's go straight for dessert. Since chewing requires so much energy, just chug that Mars bar down with a new Mars beverage.  Actually I'm willing to bed that's also truly fantastic.Bedtime. Over and out.