If you don’t know this about me yet, you can take the girl outta Philly, but you can’t take the Philly outta the girl.  One thing I love about visiting home are the things that Philadelphians tend to take for granted. 

You’ve got the pizza (which I posted about here ); you’ve got the steaks (which I posted about here ); you’ve got TastyKakes; you’ve got the soft pretzel that you buy for a quarter on the side of the road from the guy who probably doesn’t wash his hands-on which you slather French’s or Gulden’s mustard on…yum!; and then you’ve these two things that I’ve experienced these last few days.

Side note:  I went to see my friends, Mike and Christina (and their daughter, Clara), in Ohio this weekend.  Mike and I go back to Jr High-so he’s from Philly too-and Christina and I go back 10 years to when we first went to North Central together.  It was such a good time hangin’ with them…I’ll post about them later.

Mike was so excited to tell me that Dayton just got its first…RITA’S WATER ICE!!!  (Be cool, go to Rita’s!)
Water ice is very hard to explain, for some reason, and every Philadelphias/East Coaster will agree.  We’ve tried, again and again, to no avail.  It is not simply crushed ice with flavored juice, like a snow cone.  Nor is it like a slushy or a slurpee, like at 7-11.  Its flavor supercedes these things to levels that no man can truly describe.  My favorite flavor, for a long time, was banana…oh the frozen chunks of banana :0P  But since high school, I usually go for a gelati (not to be confused with the italian ice cream, "gelato").  A gelati is a combination of water ice (pronounced "wooder ice") and frozen custard.  I like mango water ice and chocolate custard.  My mouth salivates.

That was Friday night.  Now to today.  It was lunch time and of course I didn’t bring a lunch.  I headed over to the vending machine to find, none other than, a Pennsylvanian brand of chips…Herr’s!  I’m not even a huge chip fan, but I did visit the Herr’s potato chip factory when I worked a Y-Day Camp 6 years
ago…I had fresh, hot potato chips and they were stinkin’ good.  They don’t sell Herr’s around here, so I was completely shocked.  And, to top it off, the flavor (which surprisingly tasted fabulous) was Philly Cheesesteak!  I even took a picture to commemorate the moment.