Victuals

Today was shopping day. I love eating out as much or more than anyone, but you can't really arrive in a place until you have provisioned yourself and this means a journey into an unknown realm. Touristic locales tend to be English friendly. Or, you can count on some English speakers in and around hostels, but I don't live in hostel country. I live in Magyar. So, I had to go to the local grocer and try my luck. The corporate logo for the local grocery bespeaks lumber: wood products from British Columbia, a tree in the shape of a triangle. In fact, I'm sure I'd seen the logo on the side of a BC Rail wood-chip car one time, but I might be confusing it with Canfor. Undeterred by their corporate branding, I sallied forth. Hungarian may be a phonetic language, but the words bear absolutely no resemblance to any word you have ever seen, unless you have traveled to Estonia, Finland or the Eastern slope of the Northern Ural Mountains of Siberia. Fortunately, this cereal box had "spelt flakes" on the side, but, ignoring that, you can see what I'm up against here (see above).

Packaging seems to be universal and every culture seems to put a picture of what's inside on the side of the bottle or box. I suppose this isn't an entirely safe proposition, as I'm sure somewhere gasoline comes in milk cartons with a sunflower depicted on the side. If you can open it without buying it, smell it. In fact, perhaps grocery stores cold have "smell testers", little bottles, previously opened, like in Lush, so you can sample the fragrance before forking over 1200 Forint (HUF). By the way, the Lush shop is four tram stops away and, surprisingly, you cannot smell it from my flat. One great boon living here is the beer, which comes in pint (or 500 mL) bottles. This size makes a lot of sense, to me at least, because that's how big the portions are in pubs. The problem with the North American, 355 mL bottle, or the more svelt 330 mL Euro-North American version, is this: one is not enough and two is too many. Or one is too many and twelve is not enough. I get these adages confused. I want to stress that I have not seen the 330 mL Euro-North American bottles here, which leads me to conclude that this is a clever marketing ploy, preying on our fear of larger portions and more calories, and a is a means of getting the same price for 25 mL less beer. I digress: because they're pint bottles, they don't come in a six pack. So, how do you manage to pack four bottles into your shopping basket, the small Little Red Riding Hood off to Grandmother's House type baskets, without them rolling around or crushing whatever they are leaning against? I realize now, the trick is to put them in the basket LAST. I must have packed and re-packed that basket five or six times. I'm sure it appeared to all the bemused Budapesten that this 40-something ex-pat had NEVER shopped in his life before! Unlike stores back home, this one was very small, having perhaps four aisles. So, it's virtually impossible to put your basket down to re-pack it without causing a serious shopper bottleneck.

And there I stop. It's been three weeks since I became an expert blogger and I've blogged twice! So, enjoy this random taste of Budapest and please fill in the survey.

Sziastok!

Ken

Next: my balcony