Grocery Shopping

Man cannot live on bread alone, so today my roommates (Paula and Liv) and I set out to do some hefty grocery shopping. Knowing that the grocery store would not be asking us if we wanted "paper or plastic?" but would simply push our food aside for us to figure out what to do with it ourselves, we planned ahead. Each of us brought a backpack or a small bag that we would put our groceries into so that we could make the 15 minute walk home a bit easier. Well, as grocery shopping usually goes with me we spent about two hours perusing the aisles, carefully putting together dinner menus and pre-practice snacks, all the time--and I want you to picture this-- carrying a German-English dictionary in hand so we could know what we were buying. People in the store were looking at us like. . . well, like we were silly foreigners who didn't know what they were doing.

Being that it was our first real outing for any sustainable food, we had quite a bit in our cart by the time we got to the checkout counter. Paula spotted a few bright green laundry baskets, which we had on our list to get at Ikea anyway, so we bought two of those thinking it would be a genius idea to transfer all the food that didn't fit in our backpacks into the baskets and that's how we would get our groceries home. Well, it WAS a fabulous idea and I must say that Paula is quick on her feet when it comes to problem solving, but we definitely stuck out like sore thumbs as we made the 15 minute journey home, each of us packing about 10 pounds in our backpacks and two of us lugging food in obscenely colored laundry baskets. Just as we were discussing how nice it would be to have a shopping cart of some sort to transport our merchandise, (since you pay one euro to get one out at the grocery store and then get your money back when you return it, we were discussing just taking the cart on the ethical consideration that we DID pay for it. . .) Paula cried out, "Look!" So Liv and I looked and, as if it had fallen out of the heavens, there was an abandoned shopping cart in the middle of a clearing on the side of the road. What luck! Well, the pictures tell the rest of the story but needless to say, we had a great adventure today.