SuperShopping

When I first moved here to Qro, there was only one supermarket in my area. It was called "GIGANTE", and it used to make me cry.

It was like a ritual. I would go to "GIGANTE" with a mission: to make some recipe from Epicurious. I would be so optimistic, starting out, with my recipe in my hand to make something that always had this ridiculous title, like "Hazelnut Praline Torte with Creme de Menthe mousse and Chocolate Ganache, Infused with Cherry Liqueur". I would walk in the store and immediately get overwhelmed. Grocery stores here are not like the ones back home. They're massive, with names like GIGANTE, MEGA, and SUPERRAMA. They're like if Safeway and Target merged and made one big superstore.

Unfortunately, as my good friend Nikki noticed, I am an unorganized person when it comes to grocery shopping. I scramble up and down aisles and haphazardly crisscross my way through any store to get what I need. For example, I'll need milk, so I'll go to the dairy section, all the way in the back, and then go and get the bread, which is in the front, and then go for the butter, which is next to the milk, etc. I can spend HOURS in the grocery store and when I'm finished shopping my legs are so tired and I have a headache. Grocery shopping can really stress me out and it is something that I have grown to dread.

So this is what I used to do in GIGANTE, and this is why it made me cry. I'd have this long, long list of items I needed to make my ridiculously snotty recipe, take two hours crisscrossing in a store bigger than a USA Walmart, and then finally I'd be ready to leave . . . as soon as I found my last ingredient, the one that had been evading me for two hours, two pounds of hazelnuts, or whatever. It was always the most important ingredient in the recipe and I always waited until the last moment to find it. Why? I don't know.

But if I'm not organized when it comes to shopping, I am proudly organized when it comes to cooking, so I would have ready a translation of all the products needed on my list. Avellano, if you care to know, is how you say hazelnut, in Spanish. So I would look for avellano another twenty, thirty minutes, and then finally ask an employee for help. My conversation with the employee would go something like this.

Me: Excuse me, will you tell me where I can find avellano?
Employee: (not making eye contact) Avellano?
Me: Si.
Employee: The bakery.
Me: Gracias.

So I'd walk away, towards the bakery, thinking about the pleasant evening ahead of me, when all of a sudden common sense would grip me. The Bakery? I would ask myself, and my finely honed sense for common sense would tell me that the employee was wrong. But, being an American, and coming from a country where excellent customer service is something to be taken for granted, I would trust the employee and make my way across the store to the bakery.
When I finally got to the bakery, about a ten minute walk from that last helpful employee, I'd look around by myself for another ten minutes before finally asking for help from the bakery lady behind the counter.

Me: Excuse me, will you tell me where I can find avellano.
Bakery lady: Avellano?
Me: Si.
Bakery lady: Produce.
Me: They told me that I could find it here.
Bakery Lady: No, you need to go to produce.
Me: Gracias.

So I would trek on over to Produce, which would be on the opposite side of the store, a ten minute walk, of course, but at least it made sense, this time. Once in Produce, I would look around for another ten minutes, find the nuts, peanuts, cashews, walnuts, pecans, but not hazel nuts. So I'd hunt down the nearest employee (which always takes another 5 minutes, at least).

Me: Excuse me, will you tell me where I can find avellano?
Employee: Avellano?
Me: Yes.
Employee: I don't know. Sorry.
Me: What do you mean, you dont know?
Employee: Oh, you mean avellano?
Me: Yes.
Employee: We don't carry avellano here.

So I'd walk away and the tears would start to form. I'd push my cart into the center of the store, filled with items from all over the place, and just walk out.

Since those days, I've grown up a lot and can now handle stores even bigger than GIGANTE with relative ease. Plus, I never have to set foot in GIGANTE again if I don't want to, (and I don't) because Soriana bought out Gigante recently, so soon it will cease to exist and is currently transforming itself into another Soriana. Plus, in the past two years, my area has become supermarket central. We now have Walmart, Soriana, Superrama, Gigante, MEGA, and Sam's Club in a five mile radius from my home. I am always surprised at how quickly Queretaro is growing.

I'm a Superrama girl, so up until yesterday, I had never been to MEGA, which they just finished building about 5 months ago. The experience was amazing. When you get to MEGA, you notice that its a HUGE building with two floors. The first floor is a little shopping mall, galleria style, and the second floor is MEGA. To get to the second floor, you have to grab a shopping cart and make your way to this really long, steep escalator that has a no slip surface. You get on the escalator and slowly make your way up to the top. You can't push your cart and walk up the escalator rapidly, either, because the grips on the belt to the wheels of the shopping cart wont let you. You have to not move and make the slow ride up to the top. I felt like this little shopper on an assembly line, going to the factory to be assembled. Once you get to the top, they give you a map like you're in Disneyland, and that did it for me. Because of that map, I felt like I was on an adventure instead of doing boring grocery shopping.

Plus, inside MEGA is a little cafe next to the bakery, where you can take a break from the madness and have a cup of coffee or hot chocolate and read the paper, and so that is exactly what I did, and that is going to be my routine from now on. I am done with stressing myself out at the grocery store.