Early Thoughts on Shopping

It's interesting how something as simple as running errands becomes a challenge in a new country. The first question is, where do I shop? Stores are different here. So far they seem to be much smaller and much more specialized. So I can't just go to the local Target and find groceries, clothing, school supplies, cleaning supplies, and shampoo. I need to go to a different store for each thing.

The next question is, what do I buy? Some packaging here mercifully has an English translation. But most does not. So you have to figure out what to buy by looking at the picture on the package or by trying to recognize a word or two. Sometimes this is easy, like it's pretty obvious what bread is. But what about butter? The packaging here is different and I found several different products that contained the word "butter". Thankfully I have two tools that come with the computer age: 1) a program called Word Lens where you can hold up your phone directly in front of German text and it tries to give you a translation. This program is definitely hit or miss and works best with single words. 2) Google translate. If the cell service is strong enough, I can type something in and get the Google translation, which is usually good enough to understand. This is time consuming though. I stood in front of the butter in the organic grocery store yesterday for several minutes trying to figure out what to buy. I was able to determine that one package was soy butter, one was lactose free, one was some sort of yogurt butter, and one was some sort of sour cream butter. (??) I never was able to identify just plain old butter, so I eventually gave up and moved on.

So after you figure out where to shop and what to buy, you head to the checkout aisle. Despite hearing from many many people that "everyone in Berlin speaks English", I have found that most service personnel do not. This isn't a problem if all goes well with the transaction, but if either party has a question then I am like a deer in headlights. My plan so far when this happens in various situations is to state dumbly "Ich spreche Englisch." (I speak English.)  Then at least people know it's pointless to continue on in German. An interesting thing about the checkout aisle is that you must bring your own bags to the store or else purchase bags at the store. There are no free bags anywhere. Luckily I'm already in the habit of bringing my own bags, so this wasn't new to me. What is new, though, is packing my own bags. The checkout clerks ring up your items but it's up to you to pack your items away into your bags. And you'd better do it quick because they scan much faster than you can pack and you are expected to pay after the last item has been rung up. Once you have fumbled with trying to pull out the right number of Euros (credit isn't used very much here), the next customer's items start rolling down the table at you and you have to get out of the way! If you are still packing you need to collect your stuff and move to the side. A very important rule is to not buy more than will fit into your bag(s), and definitely don't buy more than you can carry! This rule came into play at the pet store, which is about a 1 mile walk from our apartment. Normally I would buy the largest bag of dog food in order to get the cheaper price, but Dan reminded me that we don't want to carry a 13 kg bag of dog food all the way home!

I have been exploring one kind of store just about every day. When we first got here we had to go to the pet store to get food for the animals, cat litter, a cat bed, etc. It turns out that the bed we got for Rhythm was too small and I decided to switch brands of dog food, so yesterday after school the kids and I trekked down to the pet store to do an exchange. I was a little apprehensive because this is kind of a big transaction to try to accomplish in German. Before we went in I looked up the German word for "exchange" in my pocket dictionary. Then I had the kids stand in the front of the store with the stuff we wanted to take back, and I went around getting the new stuff. When we got to the checkout line, I said simply "Austauch". The checkout lady then spoke to me in German, of which I understood one word, which thankfully was enough to know what she said. She pointed to my two piles and was asking me which one I was returning and which one I was buying. When she said "kaufen" I knew that had something to do with buying, because Dan's company is called "kauf-da" and it has something to do with buying. :) So I was able to point to the correct pile. Then it got tricky because I need to buy dog poop bags and hadn't been able to find them. If this were any other store I would probably just call it a day and come back another time to search longer, but since this store is so far away I knew I needed to get them today. I know the word for dog, "hund" and I thought she might know the word "poop", so I asked her "Wo sind die hund poop?" and made a motion like I was picking up poop with a bag over my hand. She said "Ah!" and led me to the spot in the store. Communication success! I was pretty pleased to have pulled off that complicated errand. And Rhythm hasn't left his new bed since we brought it home.

Yesterday I explored the organic food store. I'm really careful about what I buy in the US, but here it is hard to know where the food comes from. So far we have just been buying whatever is easiest. I hope to get better at this sooner rather than later because it's important to me to support locally made food and especially humanely raised meat. So I was happy to find this Bio Market not far from our house. It is a much nicer store than the regular grocery store near us. I spent a long time going up and down the aisles and figuring what they sell and what the prices are, and then I bought a bunch of nice stuff.

By the way, I feel like we are spending money hand over fist. We typically buy stuff on credit in Missoula and then pay the large bill at the end of every month with an electronic payment. To actually get cash from an ATM and then give it away in 2 and 10 and 50 euro increments every single day feels so much more extravagant. Whereas in Missoula I would shop for groceries usually once a week and spend under $100, I feel like I am shopping here every day and spending 30 euros every day!

Today I decided to visit the McPaper store after dropping the kids off at school. I read in someone else's blog that this is the German equivalent of Staples, although McPaper would fit in Staples' break room. Moving to another country has not saved us from accumulating paper, and we are starting to need a way to contain the kids' school paperwork, various papers we brought from home, and contracts and important insurance papers, etc. Plus the kids needed a few school supplies we didn't bring from home. I had seen a McPaper yesterday and thought "oh, there's one super close to us", but in typical Jennifer "has no sense of direction" fashion by today I had no idea where I had seen it. I pulled it up on Google maps and in this particular situation Google maps steered me totally wrong. I ended up following a wild Google goose chase for the next 40 minutes while Google led me into an apartment complex about a mile away, and then I walked back and in circles for a while before I finally realized that the store was about a block away from the bus stop I had gotten off at almost an hour ago!

When I finally found it, I proceeded to take so long looking at all the different items in the store that the German clerk, who normally just leaves you alone, had to ask me (in German) if I needed any help. I only know that this is what she asked me because after I did my deer in headlights "Ich spreche Englisch" she said "it's okay, it's okay, I offer help if you need". It pains me to buy notebooks and pencil sharpeners and markers and paper trays because we just either gave away or stored all these items in Missoula. But we couldn't take everything with us, so there's bound to be a lot of duplication and that's just the way it is. One interesting tidbit: Carter's 4th grade class requires a fountain pen! I wasn't even sure I knew what that was, but apparently they teach kids to write with them and there are even versions like this one that are made for kids.

Did you know that fountain pens are expensive? The first ones I saw were about 18 euros! Thankfully I found this kind that was about half that, but still a lot to spend on a child's pen! (about $11.25 usd)