Ok, so this might be one of the more mundane anecdotes I have to share, but I was thinking about it when I was at the grocery this evening. I was enjoying--yes, enjoying--the fact that all the labels are in English (or if they're bilingual labels, at least I can usually understand the Spanish pretty easily, too). Not really knowing the language made something as simple as grocery shopping a lot more complicated! You can't always guess what something is if you can't read the label on the jar or package--there are a variety of foods that are common there that aren't particularly common grocery store stock in the States. For example, in the grocery store near my apartment called Billa, there was some kind of bovine organ in the meat section, on whose package the ONLY word I understood was the word for "beef/cattle" but it didn't look like ANYTHING I've ever eaten that came from a cow or would ever dare eat. It had the texture of a morel mushroom
and was the color of swiss cheese.
Ick. I'm secretly afraid it was brain tissue or something equally weird. On the other hand, sometimes you can guess what something is but probably really don't want to know. Exhibit A: large, recognizable sections of or even entire squids, shrink-wrapped, slimy tentacles clearly visible, in the frozen foods section amidst the bags of frozen peas and minestrone veggie mix.
Also, some things I considered "standard" where conspicuously absent. Like milk in a jug, for example. Though I found boxed cereal and muesli, I never did find cartons or jugs of drinkable milk, only milk in a cardboard carton (which apparently didn't need to be refrigerated until opened) intended for use as creamer for coffee/tea. And trust me, that DOESN'T taste the same.
Buying fruits and vegetables also works a bit differently. You have to select and weigh your own produce at these little automated scales around the store, which print little labels with the price of your selections (produce is calculated by weight, same as much of the time it is here). However, if you don't weigh it yourself before you go to checkout, you probably get chewed out (in Italian) by the cashier. Fortunately, I was warned in advance to do this, so I didn't actually get yelled at. But I did have trouble with the machines the first time I tried to use them, since apparently all of them conspired to run out of the little printing labels at the same time. Not having used one before, and not being able to read and understand the error message on the screen, I assumed I was the one doing something wrong and proceeded to try all of the machines unsuccessfully. All I wanted was to weigh my head of lettuce, gosh darn it! I finally had to give up and resign myself to waiting nonchalantly off to the side in hopes that someone else would come by and weigh their produce so I could watch and try to figure out what I was doing wrong. Eventually a Billa employee came by and reset all the machines and replaced the label rolls so that the machines worked effortlessly as they're supposed to (so it turned out that the machines, and not I, were at fault!). But that was only after the power went out in the store, and all the patrons were bumping into each other for about 30 seconds before it came back on, since we all kept trying to do whatever we'd been in the middle of doing when it went out. (Yes, this happened the very first time I went to a grocery store in Florence. Great first impression, huh?)
What else to share? Oh, don't try to pay with credit for purchases of less than, say, 7-10 euros. You'll get a funny look or they'll ask you to pay cash instead if you can. (Once again, that's from hearsay...I'd been warned and thus didn't try it myself.) Matter of fact, it's best not to try to pay anywhere in Florence with credit unless the purchases is at least 15-25 euro...some stores and even restaurants don't take credit at all.
We went through a lot of nutella in our apartment. Nutella sandwiches in the morning took the place of cereal because of the aforementioned milk scarcity. We also went through a ridiculous amount of tea and juice. Te de pesca (peach tea) became one of my new favorite things. My roomies were quite fond of succhi di frutta, specifically of the pera and pesca varieties (pear and peach). However, Italian fruit juice has a higher viscosity and intensity than American fruit juice. If you want to get an approximate idea of the flavor, imagine buying a bottle of the juice that canned peaches or pears are packed in. That's EXACTLY what it was like. I nearly always diluted it (roughly 1 part juice to 2 or 3 parts water) to make it less overpoweringly sweet and gritty and more like American or British juice. I just told myself that I was back in the UK making squash and it was all okay (that's my shout-out of the day to all my UK peeps :) )
Last, but certainly not least, they had these awesome rolling baskets--imagine taking a little-larger-and-deeper-than-normal US grocery hand basket, then adding wheels and a rolling suitcase-style pull-up handle to it and--VOILA!--you have a store full of people pulling what look like the offspring of a grocery hand basket and a rolling backpack. Remarkably funny looking but surprisingly handy and effective. :) Only disadvantage is trying to pass other shoppers in narrow aisles...
I think I shall save descriptions of the markets and comparing/contrasting the shopping-for-fresh-food experience until another day. If you haven't yet had your fill of amusement at Billa's expense, feel free to check out their website and see what else you can find.
...and I just effectively made myself crave te de pesca by writing about it...sigh. Oh well, I'll make the American equivalent tomorrow morning. :)
Arrivederci,
Emily
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