Adventures in Grocery Shopping

Quick post today: my naive grocery shopping experience. 

This weekend is the start of the Chinese New Year holiday (think Christmas / New Year's holiday in the US), so we decided to load up on groceries since we aren't sure what will be open. Some friends suggested we head to Carrefour as they have the best prices and Western products. I've been to a Carrefour in Europe and I know they adapt their offering to the current market. However, based on the vague description of "having Western products" I naively assumed that their target market was predominantly Western foreigners with some Asian offerings thrown in. 

I was wrong. This is a Chinese grocery store. One aisle of "imported food", you know like the one aisle in American stores called "International." I feel their pain...

I walked down into the large Carrefour store and was stunned by all my senses: sights / smells / sounds. Every inch of space was filled with people, items for purchase, signs, etc. Now I realized I was definitely not properly prepared for this. We had a list of about 30 different items, but no idea where to start. For example, sugar. Sounds simple enough... Imagine 3 different aisles all with offerings of white powder in plastic bags, written in Chinese symbols... uhhh... sugar? salt? flour? baking soda? something not American altogether? Oh, it also took me about an hour to find these aisles that I think were in a "cooking section" Obviously, right next to the full aisle of soy sauce offerings.

Additionally, some items were translated into "English", but really just the roman alphabet. I'm pretty sure I purchase cauliflower, but the label said "cài huā"  There was also a good deal of things that we don't see in our stores back home... dried fish, dried full chickens, bins full of rice, butchers in open aisles.

Matt met me here off work and his first comment was "this is a cluster..." 

After about an hour and a half I think we left there only missing a five things. A serious accomplishment! (Oh, but that's after we had to go through the checkout line twice because I didnt realize you had to get all of your fruit & veggies weighed & ticketed back in the produce section. That was a hilarious explanation. We are ready to try again!

Oh, and it's snowing here! And tomorrow is Chinese New Year's Eve!!!

Pics don't do justice to this experience... Signs galore

"Dried" section: fruits / fish / meat / anything really

 Dried chickens

View into the produce section (from more dried fruit section)

RICE! ... I see how it's a staple...

This is only a 3rd of the soy sauce aisle (well I think it was all soy sauce)

Inside out corn dogs? (I'm sure there were other strange items, but I could read this one. :) )

 Snow! This is our courtyard area of our apartment. Might be hard to tell but I promise it's snowing. :)