They say you shouldn’t write about the details of your everyday life in your blog, but when I am traveling, I am constantly wondering about the everyday life in whatever place I am visiting. So today I will tell you about the grocery store.
I have actually discovered three grocery stores in the area. I only really like one of them and only visit the others for specific things. We visit the one near the playground just to buy waffles. Not frozen waffles, but waffles that come packaged like cookies. You can eat them at room temperature or put them in the toaster. The children just eat them at room temperature. Syrup, however, remains elusive.
The biggest surprise so far came at the meat counter in Standa, our grocery store of choice. They must have a lot of customers from Other Places, because they have helpfully put little labels underneath all the different kinds of meat. So the pork section has a pink sign with a pig on it. Beef is red, veal is orange, and yellow is apparently poultry, and rabbit. Oh, no, actual rabbits, in Styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic. Don’t look C-man it will only upset you because a whole rabbit in a Styrofoam tray wrapped in plastic still really looks like a rabbit. Too late, he saw them. Poor C-man. He was rather upset. And, then I assumed the blue was lamb, but wait, no, that is not a picture of a lamb. OMG, Princess O, avert your eyes. Blue is HORSE MEAT! Everyone say it with me now: EEEW!
I knew the French liked horsemeat, but I guess it never occurred to me that the Italians would eat it too. Oh, my. Needless to say, we won’t be trying that. Even if I wanted to, Her Royal Highness would be scarred for life. The same is true about the rabbit. C-man would never recover. Although, trying rabbit isn’t really an issue, since they seem to be packaged for roasting and our oven is still a mystery to me. I did take a look at the horsemeat though, just out of pure curiosity. It looks a lot like beef. Good thing for us they put those handy labels on the shelves.
The store is about a quarter the size of our local grocery at home, and I think it takes me about five times as look to do half as much shopping. I am sure there is a very complicated Word Problem in there somewhere, but I am not in the mood to go looking for it.
The difficulty, of course, is that I don’t speak Italian. So I spend a lot of time staring at labels trying to figure out what’s what. For example, fresh milk seems to come in two different colored packages: dark blue and a kind of blue-green. I have no idea what the difference is between them. But the color differentiation seems to be universal, no matter what brand of milk you get. You can also get UHT milk in cartons like juice boxes. Those are not refrigerated. I’m sure it’s fine, but I am also sure the kids would find something wrong with it, so we will stick with the fresh milk. I have discovered I can get it in liter cartons at the bar downstairs, so that’s handy, and saves lugging it home from the store.
I am slowly getting the hang of it and I am sure when I go back to Cub foods I will go into complete sensory overload, but for now it’s still a bit of a challenge. On the plus side, it is fun to wander up and down the aisles and see what you can find. One day we saw a whole swordfish head at the fish counter. That was pretty cool. I probably would have taken a picture if only I’d had my camera with me. And the store brand seems to be called “Clever” which we all think is very funny.
The other fun discovery is all the exotic and expensive things we like at home are much less expensive here. Things like Parma ham and Parmesan cheese, and good olives and fresh bread. We will be very spoiled when we get home.
Posted by goitaly 
