images from www.harvestwizard.comI love France.
One day I hope to learn how to live there.
Invariably when living in a foreign country, things fail to work as I would expect. For me, this seems to happen with a depressing frequency in buying produce. I mean from the grocery store, not from a farmers' market. I can handle buying bread or pastries, even fish from the poissonerie, but somehow I have had a depressing amount of trouble figuring out how to buy things like fresh apples.
For comparison's sake, first remind yourself how produce-buying works in the US. You find a plastic bag provided by the store, and fill it with the desired amount of fruits or vegetables of one kind. You then take that bag with you to the register, where the cashier weighs the produce and calculates the cost. In France, the first part of this process, selecting and bagging your produce, works exactly the same. Here, however, customers must find the scales located somewhere in the produce section and weigh their bunches of bananas and bags of tomatoes themselves, by selecting the correct pictogram from the list. A little sticker is printed out to adhere to the bag with the final price.
Well, except for things that aren't sold by weight, anyway. Bundles or things sold by number don't need to be weighed.
Well, yesterday I went to the Migros in Thoiry, a little town that's two little towns down from my haunt and CERN, to do my grocery shopping. Since it is Easter this weekend, I was planning a fairly fancy Sunday meal for myself, and I opted to buy some asparagus and selected a bunch all rubber-banded together. There were three prices listed, one for white asparagus, one for some fancy variety, and a third that I assumed corresponded to the bunches. However, I couldn't find that third price in the listing by the scales, so I assumed that the bunches were sold with a net price and headed to the register.
Well, apparently that was wrong. First, the cashier wasn't sure what vegetable she was holding, and apparently couldn't understand anything I was saying in French. Her English wasn't that great, either. She kept insisting that I needed to weigh it, while I kept insisting the price wasn't listed. At this point, the departure time for the next bus was rapidly approaching, and she was busy trying to call someone to go weigh the asparagus. I was willing to leave without the asparagus, but she apparently didn't comprehend that in whichever language I tried to say it in, either. So the bus left, another store work returned with the bunch of asparagus charged at the fancy price, I was handed my groceries and wished a good day.
I was certain I was getting ripped off, but I was raised to be polite and throwing a stink in a foreign language in Migros isn't polite. I am seriously reconsidering that politeness thing after spending the next 40 minutes walked over 2 miles back to my apartment in the middle of the afternoon (40 minutes of walking or 60 minutes of waiting for the next bus with butter, yogurt, and salmon in hand). Nor do I have a particularly high opinion of the average cashier at Migros, but I suppose with my limited language skills I wasn't giving any better of an impression.
There is a method I found that greatly improves one's outlook when dealing with dense store workers in a foreign language.
1. Find a fresh pineapple that smells nice. Here, they are currently selling cute little ones called pain de sucre or something like that.
2. Cut up the pineapple into chunks.
3. Chill pieces (what you haven't already eaten, anyway).
Go ahead; eat all of that cool candy-sweetness. After all, it's fresh fruit, so it must be good for you.
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