pantsfarm

Watching the status updates of my distant friend’s lives fly by I started wondering about how tastes change. I saw a few people I know going back to the places they went to college and from there one or two mentioned how they’d gone back to their old haunts.

It reminded me a bit of this time a friend of a friend came to visit Beijing and we were at dinner and I discovered that he had just finished law school at my alma mater in Chicago. We got to talking about the places to hang out in Hyde Park and it struck me how we had some very different experiences.

While I was in Hyde Park, there were a few restaurants that I went to a number of times and whie I don’t think I would have said they were amazing places, weren’t bad food. But since leaving Chicago, or hell, since getting out of Hyde Park more in later years, I’ve realized that a lot of the places I’d eat at repeatedly were actually kind of awful. Convenient and good enough, but otherwise wholly unremarkable if not actually remarkably gross.

So when I see people go back to their school and say how they’ve eaten at one of their old haunts and how great it is, it makes me wonder if they just had much better food around their school, or if they haven’t since expanded their definition of great food since finishing college. For me there’s not much I would go out of my way to have in Hyde Park. While the 55th street may have been where I have eaten the largest amount of Thai food in my life by volume, it is certainly overrepresented relative to how good it is.

Of course, it’s not just the food. It’s the place as much as the food for a nostalgic visitor. In fact, upon thinking back, I am probably guilty of having made these same kinds of status updates myself. Shortly after moving to China, I did go back to Hyde Park and I probably ate all the same crappy things and thought so highly of the experience because of all the good things I associate with the places I ate, all the things besides the food.