buying groceries and the global economy

My local grocery store is a little less than a mile away from my apartment, about a ten minute brisk walk, and I always walk briskly. The sidewalks leading there are exceptionally narrow, with the typical brown, metal cylinders positioned every 5 or 6 feet, which serve to smash my eggs and bruise my tomatoes on my walk home, among other things. These things combined with your typical Madrileno's love for taking up space makes me put off serious trips to the store for as long as possible. I can get by with making small purchases at the store near my work and transporting them in the metro for about a week, the time it takes me to run out of bread, milk, tomatoes, and juice simultaneously.

Two days ago was that day, and today I finally made it to the store. It was 3 pm, one of the slowest and busiest times to buy groceries besides all of the other busiest times to buy groceries that aren't at the moment the store opens. Things went smoothly, minus an awkward moment-- for me, anyway-- when a man with a shopping cart refused to move even a centimeter backward in the egg aisle to let me through until he had examined the three main types of milk, skim, semi-skim (there's no 2% here), and whole. I hope he learned all he set out to.

The time came to check out. There was a Chinese girl already checking out in front of me with mounds of items, so much that the dainty check out lane couldn't handle the whole load at once and both lanes had to be used. This was all fine, except that when the woman at the cash register tallied the amount at 53 euros the girl was shocked and wanted to leave some items behind. This would have been fine as well, except that the girl spoke almost no Spanish, and the woman at the cash register, as far as I could tell, spoke no Chinese, unless she was hiding it out of pure meanness.

This was more or less the source of the confusion. Clearly the shopper and the worker had differing opinions in what this seemingly unthreatening mathematical equation meant. To try to clear up the misunderstanding, the woman at the cash register, a young Spanish woman with big loop earrings, resorted to standard operating procedure for store workers attempting to communicate with those who don't speak their language well. This involves the rapid-fire repeating of important phrases in as many different ways as possible so that the listener can choose the one they understand most to respond to. In each case, using more words is considered better, especially friendly additional words that make one sound more down-to-earth (like the English word "folks", which consequently, has never appeared in any of the English text books I teach from).

The listener, in this case the now desperately gesturing Chinese girl, can then respond by understanding absolutely nothing and offering a smile meant to assure the other that, at the least, they aren't crazy.

I was standing innocently behind the girl in line while this went on, occasionally offering sympathetic faces at both of them if they looked my way. Their conundrum continued for a good 5 minutes, but after hearing the girl say something in English, and the worker respond with an annoyed hombre, yo no hablo ingles, I offered to help out. The girl only spoke a little English, and so my help consisted of telling the woman at the cash register everything she already knew: that the girl misunderstood the sale sign and now wanted to leave just about everything she had at the register minus a six-pack, a bag of spinach, a package of fruity yogurt, and a sealed bag of freshly-chopped fish, freshly-chopped fish being unreturnable-- something that I think everyone at the register, regardless of nationality, could appreciate.

In the end I was allowed to purchase my groceries before the problem was all the way solved, after the flustered girl's groceries were crammed completely on the other side of the register. As I turned to leave the embattled pair faced each other once again. I felt a bit like a coward for leaving before the battle was over, the returning of the goods battle, but I had class and I had already dedicated a good 7 minutes toward grocery store diplomacy.

On another note, here is a picture of a Carnival party at my apartment with my roommates, Javier, Peter, and Ricardo.