Au contraire. I live in Somerville, which is part of the Greater Boston Area sprawl. You cannot bung a rock out here without hitting some kind of small spa run by Spanish-speaking people. I don’t know if they’re Mexican specifically, but they carry the same stuff I would expect to find in equivalent places in Arizona, where I grew up. It’s also in the regular grocery stores. There’s fresh jicama on sale at the one across the street from me right now, and an entire aisle of things by Goya. Some of the CVS locations even carry canned coconut water and Maria/Palmeritas cookies.
I expected Mexican food to be something I’d come to miss on this coast, but no – it’s pretty common, and no less authentic.
I looooove my Chicago public transportation, especially when the weather is crappy. I live on the edge of the city proper, but I walk 5 minutes to the train, and then I get on the train, put on my headphones, and zone out instead of fighting traffic on the way to work. If it snows, the train still runs, and I don’t have to shovel out my car all week if I don’t feel like it. Our car will be 3 years old next month, and we just hit 10,000 miles on it.
Also, I love my ethnic grocery shopping! You’d be hard-pressed to find an ethnic ingredient that can’t be found within, oh, 10 miles of here. I went to grad school in Bloomington, Indiana, and there was basically one ethnic grocery store for the whole town (I think they mostly catered to homesick foreign grad students). Once I commented aloud that the Middle Eastern spinach pies looked just like the ones I used to buy in Chicago before I went to grad school. And the owner told me they were from the same place! It’s a Middle Eastern grocery/bakery/deli 3 blocks from the apartment where I lived before grad school (and about 2 miles from where I live now). But they are baked all day at the source, instead of schlepped in by van once or twice a week.
Chicago’s public transit is good, but I got the impression it has gotten a lot worse in the last few years. About 4 years ago I would only have to wait for a few minutes for a bus. The last couple of years when I was there I was waiting 10-15 minutes.
I would never want to depend on buses for my daily commute - trains all the way! Don’t need to deal with traffic. And buses sometimes have bigger problems with bunching (several in a row, and then non for 20 minutes). The major criterion when we bought our condo was to be within walking distance of a train line.
I meant the grocery in Bloomington. It sounds like an interesting place. From what I saw there, most of the ethnic groceries tended to be asian, not middle eastern.
There are probably half a dozen ethnic grocers in Bloomington now, but most are asian heavy or asian exclusive in their selection of items. I don’t know which ones, if any, have a good middle eastern selection so I was curious about that.