Eating Dogs or Hot Dog vs Parek Rohliku

Memphis said, "you eat a lot of dogs." And we do, but not the four legged kind, and not as often as that week we had hotdogs three times. I swear we aren't those kind of Americans. What we had was actually hot dogs, chili dogs, and slaw dogs (my personal favorite). How is the hot dog experience different for us here than abroad? Here we go to the grocery store, to the section which advertises in bright pink neon lights, "best meat in town" (it isn't), grab a pack of hotdogs, sometimes marked "franks" or "frankfurters" or "wieners", but absolutely no one uses these last two words to refer to hot dogs. Frankfurters are people from Frankfurt, and the popular use of wiener is penis, so take my advice, and never go up to an American meat department and ask if you can have some of their wieners. Unlike a parek, which was made recently of fresh ingredients, American hot dogs are loaded with chemical preservatives, assorted animals parts (don't ask), and have a shelf life of several months.

Hot dogs come in packs of 8, as do the buns. Bread in America is unlike bread anywhere else in the world. It is soft, and by the rest of the world's standards, old. If you want bread baked fresh, you can find it in a grocery store bakery section, but nine times out of ten--no, ten times out of ten, it is made from frozen dough that has been shipped halfway across the country from God only knows where. Like I said, it's a big country, and bread is one reason why big is not better. To complete the standard hot dog meal, we grab a can of chili and a can of pork n' beans (we get the vegetarian kind, made without meat, and with lots of brown sugar. No kidding!).