Entry #4: Canadians in Sainsbury's

If you were to blindfold me, drive me to any grocery store in Canada, lead me to the doors and take off the blindfold, I guarantee you that I could get my shopping done in roughly the same timeframe as if in my own local store. Standing at the front doors of a grocery store in a foreign land, however, is like landing on another planet.

Dave and I stood frozen at the front doors of a Sainsbury’s, a few blocks away from our place, as other customers flew past us, bee-lining with precision from shelf to shelf, filling their baskets. I envied them. We had no idea where to start. We had to learn how to grocery shop all over again.

I had unwittingly imagined that our experiences doing some grocery shopping in Rome across the street from our campground would be suffice practice in the art of buying food in Europe. There, we learned very quickly that in order to purchase produce, one had to bag the item, place the bag onto a weighing scale and punch in the product number. The machine then spit out a sticker that had a barcode and the price printed on it, which you stuck onto your bag. All the cashier needed to then do was scan your bag at the checkout and voila! How wonderful!

Being in an Italian grocery store was almost like going to another museum or an art gallery – new exciting packages and brands with labels you can’t read, so you’re never quite sure what’s inside. We once bought a six pack of yogurt, only to later realize that it was a yogurt drink. That was a fun surprise. They also sold wonderful, more appetizing things, like Buffalo Mozzarella, mango Tic-Tacs, and freshly made zucchini and cheese pizza for less than 2 Euros a slice.

But this wasn’t Rome anymore; this was what would become our local supermarket, where we would do all our shopping from now on. I didn’t want to feel like I was in a museum – I wanted to buy good food that I knew I liked with relative efficiency. We slowly walked through all the aisles, holding up packages and tins to our faces to read the labels and decipher what they contained. We examined prices in a foreign currency and tried to choose between one brand we didn’t know and another brand we didn’t know. We silently jumped for joy whenever we saw something we recognized, even if we would never buy it, like a multi-pack of Twix bars, Special K cereal, Ritz crackers, or Uncle Ben’s Instant Rice. It is a feeling unlike any other to find yourself staring down an aisle, with products and brands brimming over the shelves, still having no idea what’s down that aisle.

We bought 1.7% milk in a plastic jug, smooth Tropicana orange juice (as opposed to the Tropicana orange juice with juicy bits), and three peppers – one yellow, one red, one green – that came prepackaged together in a bag. We passed by prepackaged pancakes, croissants and Yorkshire puddings. An entire section of the store was devoted to Wine, Spirits and Beer, with a larger selection than a small LCBO. The cheese section was filled with all sorts of cheeses with names straight off a map of Britain. Even Dave hadn’t heard of most of them before, and he worked in a cheese shop for four years. We bought a container of drinking chocolate, streaky bacon, and peanut butter in a glass jar. The only saving grace in the whole escapade was the fact that, being raised in a British-Canadian home, I did know some useful things, like to buy Yorkshire teabags and chocolate Hob-Nob cookies and to steer clear of the marmite.

Every, and I mean every, package contained the same nutritional information labels, from which you could learn a whole array of information about the product. For example, were you aware that a 4 gram serving of white, granulated sugar contains exactly 4 grams of sugar and nothing else? Did you know that sour cream is in fact suitable for vegetarians? Or that one apple provides you with one portion of your five daily servings of fruits/vegetables? I don’t know where Britain would be without these enlightening nuggets of wisdom.

We bought until we couldn’t carry it anymore, a technique learned from my friend Taryn, a Torontonian who has to carry home all her shopping. “Never get a shopping cart, or else you’ll end up buying more than you can handle!” Wise advice, as we had no Toyota Echo but a moderate walk awaiting us. We unloaded our baskets onto the ridiculously small counter with no black conveyor belt and bagged everything ourselves. Our technologically lacking credit card that had to be swiped and that produced a receipt that had to be signed, was scrutinized by the cashier. It seemed to take him a while to remind himself again how exactly this stone-age era contraption worked. He examined Dave’s signature in the way that made us feel like we were underage, trying to sneak into a club. The good news was that the whole trip cost us less than twenty-five pounds – about fifty-five Canadian dollars. Not bad at all.

We carried our loot home and realized that we hadn’t actually bought our own groceries for our own home in about two months, and it felt good. We had survived the adventures of our first shopping experience, and went home to a meal that we cooked ourselves. For dessert I couldn’t wait to have some rice pudding (all to myself – when Dave sees it he throws up a little bit in his mouth), but funnily enough, our fully equipped kitchen did not come with a can opener. After poking and prodding at the can with the mystery appliance found in our drawer (we hadn’t quite figured out what this metal contraption with a black handle was used for – apparently not opening cans), Dave took to it with his Swiss Army knife. As we poured the rice pudding into a bowl we realized that the inside of the can wasn’t covered in white plastic like all tins in Canada are, but was metal. Seems I have a choice to make – Alzheimer’s or rice pudding? Some of you might know the answer already, but it seems that I’ve already forgotten the question.