Skip to main content

Fine, You Win

Things *are* different here. I give up. I won't go on pretending that everything is the same (I will, however, go on pretending that my last post wasn't about how things are different here). I do want to focus on one particularly curious area though, and that is the lovable supermarket.

For you older stateside readers, you've been hearing about European-style supermarkets for years and years. There might have been one or two in your entire metropolitan area as of 15-20 years ago, but they're growing in number in the US of A. Aldi is the most notable one, and they're doing booming business (there are probably statistics to back this up, but I'll pass on them) in lots of big cities where people want cheap food options.

Yes, you have to pay for bags. No, carts aren't an option. Yes, you bag your own groceries. These are some of the smallish quirks of the European grocery store. It's really very simple and they're almost indistinguishable from their American counterparts. Except for one small thing.

They are a goddamn nightmare like all the time.

I just visited the supermarket and spent more time there than I have on any previous visit. I did this because I have today off and we needed some things, and also because there were some items that we didn't think they would have, so I looked very intently for them. We kinda want to make Christmas cookies (OK, busted, chocolate chip cookies under the guise of Christmas. We'd eat them all long before the 25th, if they even made it past the dough-form and into becoming actual cookies at all), but buying cookie-dough is quite literally a foreign concept over here.

We needed brown sugar and I also hoped to find chocolate chips.

In typical US grocery stores, things are impeccably ordered. There is a baking section, there is a breads section, chips aisle, dairy section, pharmacy aisle, etc. You've all been there and you know that you can pretty comfortably find anything in a standard Kroger, Giant Eagle, Piggly Wiggly, Jewel, or whatever your local retailer is called. Hell, you could easily go into one a grocery store 1000 miles away and feel pretty comfortable there to find whatever you need.

Not quite the same here. I counted four different areas of the store where bagged sugar is sold. None of it was brown. One of those areas sold "raw, organic sugar" while another sold "raw cane sugar." They were on different floors of this store.

Flour is the same - I noticed flour in what appeared to be the baking section. It had pancake mix, cake mixes, and more, but not sugar, nor salt, nor anything else that comes to mind when you think of baking. Except, you know, candles, cake decorations, sprinkles, and literally everything that you could want that isn't essential to making cake.

What I'm trying to say is that while everything is "orderly" in some way - the breads are all in one place, but they're only near certain types of bread-based things...like some of the crackers while the other crackers are upstairs. The pasta sauces are all together, but they're two aisles away from the other dressings and sauces. The milk....oh the milk. Some of it is in a refrigerator, most of it is not. This is inexplicable - I cannot explic this and I don't want to.

Woof.

Send cookie dough.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I Have to Write about Basketball

I have about an hour to write out my thoughts about the NBA Finals since I didn't want to at 1 a.m. and I have to be at work soon (and I'll be there for a longer-than-normal day). So here goes. 1) Everyone wants to talk about Steph Curry, and everyone should  be talking about Steph Curry. I don't get it. He's the best shooter in NBA history - although Klay Thompson is hot on his heels - and yet there's something amiss at surprising times. I don't believe in "clutch" the way a lot of people do, because if Steph doesn't hit a million threes all the time, the Warriors are never in position for him to take a game-winner in the Finals (they also don't make the Finals). All of them are worth three points, so they need the first one as much as they need the last one. But something kind of happens, doesn't it? And doesn't it affect his legacy a tiny bit? Steph shot 34.3% on three-pointers this series. Toronto was all over  him defensivel...

Vienna Christmas, part 1

When I last left you, the two Koniecznys were about to arrive and we were going to do...well, something. And a week later we were all going to Vienna for Christmas to see some of my family members who live there (one of them is Norbert, who you might remember from canyoning). Carly and her mom got in on Sunday and we just kinda hung out the first day or two, but they wanted to see the sights and took off to see some nearby things and places, which is something they might tell you about if they were blogging but I don't think they are. Anyway, the real excitement started at the end of the week. Carly and her mom took an overnight train to Vienna on Thursday/Friday and Jenna and I had to wait until Saturday to go. We took a two-layover train; once in Verona to turn to the north and then a second stop in Innsbruck to switch onto an Austrian (OBB) train that would swoop through southeastern Germany en route to Vienna. It was a nearly 12 hour day of trains and, believe it or not, it...

New Year's Eve

One thing that seems to be a true worldwide phenomenon is the realization that my last name is used on New Year's Eve signs around the globe. At first I felt slighted, as if someone were cheapening the worth of my last name. In more recent years I've taken is as a weird sort of compliment and even occasionally tried to make it into a pseudo-attention-getting thing if I'm feeling very "look at me" on a particular day. But that's not what I'm supposed to tell you about because that's boring. What's not boring is that most of the big cities around the world do big exciting fireworks displays and celebrations that stretch way beyond a ball dropping down a pole and standing in a crowd of 500,000 people for nine hours. In short, New Year's in the states generally blows. In the northern US you either go overpay by insane amounts to go to a bar and then wait for three hours for a cab back home or you go to a friend's house and it's...fine. ...