Weird Stuff at The Grocery Store

Even after six weeks here, I still find going to the grocery store to be an experience. About a month ago I got turned on to Kaufland, which is an interesting hybrid of a normal supermarket, Costco, and a corner Romanian grocery shop. The aisles are large and well lit. In some areas the presentation of merchandise is well polished and in others it looks more like you’re in a warehouse. The vegetables are not hydrated or refrigerated, but this is because they are actually fresh. They are also not washed in chemicals before they make it to the shelf, and some produce still has the dirt from the farm on it. unlike in American stores you are responsible for determining the weight of your purchase, and printing the bar code. The store has an in house bakery and one of the largest delicatessen counters I have ever seen. But its offerings appear to change at random. And Items in the store are periodically sold out. The same actually goes for vegetables which come and go. One of the reason s I enjoy traveling so much is to experience these cultural differences. Some of the differences are rather interesting. For example, Romanians like soft cheeses, the cheese counter is filled with endless varieties of them, but to find parmesan, you have to go to the back of the store where they only sell three rather expensive brands. There is a large butcher’s counter, and 3 large meat cases, but they sell mostly salami. Fining pasta sauce is hard and when you do it isn’t cheap. Instead people buy tomato bullion and make it themselves. I have found that what I can make is better than any canned sauce.One last Example: I was looking in the champagne section for a bottle of Moldovan Spumant. Apparently the Romanians have discovered this, and they were out of it. So, I was scouring the shelves to see if I could discover a stray bottle when noticed something rather odd. Amid all of the other sparkling wines I noticed they were selling Hanna Montana (non-alcoholic) champagne. It looked so much like the other sparkling wines that I almost didn’t see it. When I saw this it was all I could do to keep from breaking down in an open fit of amazed laughter. But this does show a larger cultural difference. In mainstream America, any parent who bought something like this out of a store’s liquor section, for their young child would most likely be considered a bad parent. And in the Maldives, where I worked two years ago, there wouldn’t even be a liquor section to put it in. Suffice it to say, that sometimes the ways in which differences manifest themselves can be unexpected.