hey all!
long time no see! just kidding i heard from y’all sunday but 1 day here feels like 3 days in reality and it scares me, i always have so much on my schedule and the days feel like they last forever. but one of the weirdest things about college (for me) was the DRASTIC food change.
so here’s the thing, i go to school in washington dc at a school called george washington. we are in the LITERAL HEART of dc, not like the other schools in dc we go to school between the white house and the state department!!! 5 blocks from the lincoln memorial, 3 blocks from the white house and i could go on but i won’t. since i live in a part of dc that is mostly offices there tend to be a really decent amount of places to go out but let me tell you my school’s dining caveat, we do not have a traditional dining plan.
do you either a) remember when you were in college b) are in college now c) or have toured any colleges? yes! great then you probably know one thing or another about college cafeterias. some people argue its the worst food on the planet, others love it but its pretty common to the college experience to have a dining hall/cafeteria. one thing that GW is pretty famous for is the fact that we don’t have any cafeterias in foggy bottom (the main campus). yes, yes we have one on the vern but am i gonna take 20 minutes of my time to take the vex just to get cafeteria food, no, no is correct.
so, since we have no dining halls we have our ‘gworld’ cards where we have a balance every semester to buy food with for ourselves. we can buy food from local restaurants, chains like chipotle or sweetgreen, or markets like our local fobogro, whole foods or safeway. but here’s another note, since we have a balance, its very easy to calculate how much we have per day, and we have about $18 /day.
i know what you’re gonna say, kate that seems like a lot of money. yes, almost $20 is actually alot of money, but think of it this way. a steak burrito bowl from chipotle is $8.60 where i am. one ‘meal’ is 8.60 which is about half your daily spending. and no, i usually only eat 1/2 of a chipotle burrito bowl at a time but you can easily see where this can get very complicated. i think if i was a person who ate a lot more, with eating out 2/day that the money would disappear very quickly, because you would only be able to eat twice a day instead of three times and this would not include snacking.
in trying to be very money conscious, i usually only eat one meal out per day, this meal is usually chipotle, sweetgreen, &pizza (a local personal sized pizza chain), roti (a mediterranean chipotle style chain near us) and whole foods prepared stuff. now what do i do with my other meals?
all of the places that i would go out and eat from although act as ‘single serve’ restaurants i try to make ‘two meals’ out of. i do this by either, a) going, eating half and bringing the rest home b) eating between lunch and dinner to fool my stomach. and i know this isn’t always sustainable, sometimes i come back from a 5 mile run around the capitol and i can eat an entire chipotle bowl, and that’s okay, and i know i should fully be nourishing my body and i am eating real food.
for my other two meals of the day here’s what i’ve been doing.
for breakfast: RX bars, apples and peanut butter, cheerios and almond milk
for lunch/dinner (depending on my schedule): frozen meals, soup (pre-prepared by whole foods), microwave meals, leftovers and whatever i can easily cook!
i am still trying to work out a food plan that i’m more comfortable with but for right now this works for me and is satisfying. but i will be sharing one of my favorite ‘easy’ college recipes soon!
enjoy all!
