Shopper in a Strange Land

What I enjoy most about spending time in other countries is not, I am embarrassed to admit, visiting museums, touring castles or cathedrals, exploring archeological sites, or checking off items from TripAdvisor’s “must see” list.

What I love most is grocery shopping.

There. I said it.

Call me a Philistine. And I don‘t mean a native or inhabitant of ancient Philistia. (See I’m NOT a Philistine. A Philistine would never know that.) I mean a person disdainful or ignorant of intellectual or artistic values.

I am not disdainful. I do go to museums. Really I do. But what really excites me is walking through a Spar or a Billa. Give me a Carrefour to cruise. An Inka to investigate.

Strolling the aisles, I am surrounded by women. I see domestic life lived in the public sphere. I experience the everyday-ness of the community of which I am a temporary resident. I see how similar we are, we women who shop: the harried professional in her office outfit, the old woman who probably lives alone, the mother juggling stroller and grocery cart.

In countries where the language is completely unfamiliar, I make a game out of trying to guess what the product on the shelf actually is. Sometimes even the picture does not help. Once, in a Prague grocery store, I studied the soup choices for a full five minutes, finally selecting something that looked like it could be chicken soup. Back at the apartment with access to a dictionary, I discovered that I had chosen the Czech favorite (but alas not mine): liver dumpling soup.

I am interested to see (and am often mystified by) the U.S. products that make their way onto foreign shelves. In a Vienna grocery store yesterday, I stood transfixed in front of two long shelves filled with more varieties of Uncle Ben’s converted rice than I knew existed. Fun fact: In the 1910s, a German-British scientist Erich Huzenlaub invented a form of parboiling designed to retain more of the nutrients in rice, make it resistant to weevils and reduce cooking time. Thus goes the backstory to Uncle Ben’s. This, folks, is why god invented Wikipedia.

I love that something as easy as grocery shopping, an activity I have done roughly 12,873 times in my life, can all of a sudden be challenging. Weighing your own produce. Who knew? Looking in vain for cans of soup to discover that soup comes only dried, in packets. Performing mental gymnastics as you calculate the dollar- per-pound cost of the euro-per-gram Emmentaler. Learning (the hard way) that you must very very quickly put all your scanned items back into your grocery cart and walk them over to a bagging area. And self-bag.

Off I go now to see the Stadt der Frauen exhibit at the Belvedere. But the real treat of the day will be my hunt for Griechischer Joghurt at the Eurospar.