I Suck at Grocery Shopping!

I hate grocery shopping. I hated it in a country where I could read signs, labels, prices and packaging. I ESPECIALLY hate it in a country where I can do none of the above. I wouldn’t have gone shopping tonight had my roommate not eaten all of my food while I was in Vienna this weekend. Ah…the joys of living with other people! Why do I have such crappy luck with random roommates? Kamaran is looking pretty good these days!
Imagine going to Costco and wandering up and down every aisle, which you have to do because you have NO idea what the aisle markers say, hoping to recognize a picture on a package. Also imagine that you are vertically challenged so even if you see a picture of alphabet soup, you would need a ladder to actually reach it. Sounds fun, eh? Tonight was extra fun! As I pushed *my* cart down aisle čtyři (4) at Tesco, a lady came running up to me shouting in Czech and pointing at me. Awesome! I said, in my best Czech accent (read: horrible), "I’m sorry but I don’t speak Czech". That didn’t phase her. She kept yelling and began taking my items out of the cart and pointing at the cart and then herself. I finally realized that you have to PAY to unlock and use a cart…and evidently she’d paid for that one. Oops. Maybe she shouldn’t have left it empty and unattended!! That’s what was going through my head but the only thing coming out of my mouth was "Prosim, prosim, prosim" (sorry, sorry, sorry). Worst was over, right? Oh no – awkward misunderstandings seemed to be the theme during tonight’s grocery run. I won’t bore you with an account of each instance that I put something in my basket (the free kind that you carry, not the costly kind you push) because I thought the picture looked vaguely similar to what I wanted, and then found the actual item I was looking for seven aisles over and had to retrace my steps to find where I got the original (wrong) item. Good times. The highlight of tonight’s trip came when I arrived in the checkout line, naively assuming that I was home free! I confidently set my basket on the belt (for lack of a better word…what the hell do you call the area where you set your groceries?) behind a couple other customers, thinking that all I had to do now was hand the lady my credit card, sign my name and escape the hell that is Tesco! At that very moment, the belt (?) began moving at Mach speed, sending my basket to the front of the line, taking out every carton of eggs, bottle of milk and loaf of bread innocently standing in its path! After the little old checkout lady was done scrambling to save what she could of the other shoppers’ items, she gave me a very animated demonstration of taking the items out of the basket and placing them individually on the conveyor belt, rather than putting the full basket down on the (apparently) weight-activated belt. Who knew?

Moral of this story? I suck at grocery shopping. My request of you? Please pray that *people* (from texas) keep their grubby paws off my food so I won’t have to return to Hell anytime soon!