Grocery Shopping

I hate to say it, but what with the numerous hours spent in orientation these past two days, grocery shopping with my host family this evening has been one of the highlights of my trip so far. We went to MegaMaxi, a store specifically designed to overshadow the famous and once very popular SuperMaxi. MegaMaxi is only a few blocks from the house, and even though it's a behemoth that sells everything from orange juice to car parts and electronics, it's housed inside a large mall complex. (This mall was also where we went to get phones earlier in the afternoon.)

We got in and of course, my family wanted me to point out every single thing in the store that I liked so that they could buy them all for me. I tried to equivocate rather forcefully at the cheese display, but that only brought more urging from the family and amused stares from the guys behind the deli counter.

While shopping, we encountered a number of unusual and occasionally unnerving items.

For instance, there was the aisle of bagged milk:

The family claimed that there was something magical about those bags that allowed the milk to stay fresh even though it wasn't refrigerated. I wondered how they could possibly be practical since once you cut them open, there's no way to reseal them. So far, I haven't seen one in action.

Here's another item I've long considered perishable that just wasn't refrigerated:

Nothing special about those packages...

Also amusing were the pea scoopers they had in the vegetable section. I would think that of all vegetables, the tiniest, squishiest one wouldn't be a first choice for scooping, but whatever.

I've been trying to sample all of the wild tropical fruits available here, and I tore through the fruit section grabbing anything that looked unfamiliar. Most of the super weird stuff came prepackaged in slices or as juice condensate. We mixed a batch of guanabana juice tonight and it wasn't bad. Yesterday, we tried maracuya (my favorite so far) and naranjilla, and at lunch, various people tried other juices, the only one I can recall being mora. All I heard about mora at the time was that it was a berry, so I assumed it was some exotic local thing... Turns out it's just blackberries... Oh well.

When we checked out, the guy bagging our groceries threw them into bags so fast I thought we would pull a muscle. Then he took our cart into the elevators that serve as the store's front doors and we carted our groceries out into the mall parking garage, all of which I found incredibly surreal.

Overall, an interesting experience, and I'm looking forward to sampling some of the crazy stuff we got!