Question Machine

I’m usually not the kind of person who asks a lot of questions. Sometimes I can’t think of any, or I figure I can just work through whatever it is myself, but living in a foreign country has completely changed the game; I’ve never had so many questions in my life.

Take grocery shopping, for example. Sounds quite mundane, right? But there are so many things we take for granted when we grow up somewhere. At first just walking into a grocery store was intimidating. Here is a snippet of my internal running dialogue: Is there special grocery store etiquette that I’m not privy to? Where are the carts? Oh no! Do I have a euro so I can get a cart? (Thankfully at the stores I frequent most often, you can just take a cart; once I even saw a man take his cart across the street to his house, unload his groceries and bring it back!) Does this store want you to pre-weigh and price your produce before checking out? (This is actually really neat...at the bigger stores, you put your produce on a scale and select the item type, and the scale prints out a price sticker for the item right then. I like knowing right away what something will cost me, especially since everything is in kilograms!) Oh great I'm here...now how will I recognize what I want? You never realize how much you count on packaging and labels to find the food you want until they're all different. Oy. One day I had to ask where the butter was and then where the sour cream was. But hey...just a few weeks here and I’m already starting to feel more at home.

Deine,
N*

P.S.  You don't even want to hear about me learning to use a washing machine here...