all you can tolerate

mb and i spent labor day weekend in the upper peninsula of michigan, enjoying a fun few days of mountain biking, hiking and swimming in a very wavy lake superior. i'm sure i could find something in me about nature or getting away from the city or something, but instead let me focus briefly on one of the best things the northwoods has to offer: the all-you-can-eat buffet.

coming in at number three for funniest all-you-can-eat: friday night fish fry. while quite welcome after twenty miles of biking dirt roads along cliffs, there's something funny about a whole table with nothing but piles of unmarked battered [presumably] fish. i didn't care really what it was after being outside all day, but it's still a little disturbing.

number two goes to the restaurant next door's breakfast buffet, which advertised a selection of hot foods plus a "fruit bar." excellent, we thought. it would be nice to eat something fresh. but "fruit bar" turned out not to hold actual fruit, but four different colors of fruit whip (you know, that cream stuff with colored pieces of some kind?), lemon pudding, and grapes.

but solidly above the pack was the new lunch buffet near my parents' place, which i attended on returning to their house to prepare for my brother's wedding. $5.45 buys you a ticket to a chinese-japanese-mongolian-barbecue-dim-sum-sushi-american-italian smorgasbord. you know you're dining in style when a glittering lite-brite-esque picture of an eagle on a mountain hovers over ham-and-pickle sushi next to 8 options of greasy chicken pieces next to tater tots next to egg rolls in which nobody told the chef you can't substitute sauerkraut for regular cabbage, all topped off with a soft-serve ice cream machine.

mb said it best: the reason we got higher educations and left our small hometowns was so we could come back and look down our noses at them for sport... but we don't really want to lose token-hick-in-the-city status either. so i think we have to employ selective memory (if the first buffet wasn't very good, why did we think the next two would be better?) and a love of the ridiculous. if we keep putting ourselves in all-you-can-eat country, we can enjoy our assumed superiority with statements like "really, mother, you must know about pedicures" and "what do you mean, there's no starbucks or jamba juice for the next 100 miles???" and when we come back to the city we can claim disgust over the unhealthy food we just ate over some butt-firming pseudo-yoga (thanks, blogmate!) before deciding we're better than the yuppie frills of the city and going in search of a city fish fry and cheap beer. good thing we don't mind contradictions.