The crunch I still remember

In my childhood memories, there’s a bakery van that still brings a smile to my face. It used to park on the side of the road, across from a row of shops in Ghusais. This was sometime in the late 1980s though I must have been just four or five years old then.

The van was white, with the bakery’s name printed on the side, though I can’t recall what it was. It only came once a week, but that one day felt special. My family and I would walk over, and inside the van were neat rows of freshly baked bread, soft buns, and my absolute favorite freshly fried potato chips.

I was always fascinated by the sight of so many delicious things inside a single van. My parents would buy fresh bread and without fail, a packet of chips each for my brother and me. The chips came in a clear packet with a picture of a smiling baker and the bakery’s name printed in both Arabic and English along with the expiry date.

Those chips were something else. They were thin, golden, perfectly crisp, and just salty enough. You could even taste the light oil they were fried in, which somehow made them even better. To this day, I have never found chips that taste quite like those. Nothing ever came close.