Around the neighborhood

We woke up this morning well rested.  The Things slept way past us until about 10am.  Shocking! I may have to move them back and forth through time zones to keep this up. 

After breakfast, our sponsor picked us up for a tour of the neighborhood. He showed us some routes around the neighborhood.  We drove up to the kids' future school which on the outside does not compare to the buildings of the American School of Warsaw.  It is supposedly a very good school so I will wait until August to write about that.

We drove to our permanent house just to see where it is.  There are many heurigers in the area.   These wine taverns are surrounded by their own vineyards and serve their own wine along with food.  There are several in walking distance from our permanent residence. I look forward to checking them out. 

Our main destination today is the supermarket.  Yesterday, we only bought a few basics to get us through the day.  Today was major shopping time.  Our sponsor took us to Merkurmarkt which he states is similar to a US Supermarket. It is similar because the aisles are set up similarly.  Luckily this is not the first time we've been to a foreign market. 

For those who are unaware or have not read my 2006 posts,  all the carts are locked and you can only access a shopping cart here if you deposit a Euro. If you bring the cart back and pop it into the lock, you get your Euro back.  This helps to ensure there are no stray carts.  On a side note, this whole process trained me well as when I returned to the US, I found it hard to leave a cart lying around anywhere and started returning them to the receptacles.

Produce must be weighed and labeled before you check out, a lesson learned from Warsaw.  You don't just bag your produce and head to checkout or you get sent back.  They have these machines with touch screens where you select what produce you are buying and you put it on machine (a scale) which then delivers a label for you to place on the bag.

I was still familiar with many of the products available here.  The Cat was having a free for all in the bakery and had to be told to put things back.  It was like a kid at the candy store. Thing 1 found what he wanted: Kinder products.  If you have ever traveled overseas you may have noticed these sweets cleverly aimed at children made by the same company that brought us Nutella.  The Kinder eggs are the most popular for the kids and consist of a hollow milk chocolate egg with a toy in a plastic canister inside the egg.  They are banned in the US because of some law that says you are not allowed to have inedible objects contained in edible ones.  I guess someone must have tried to eat the toy.  He picked the Pingui which is like a candy bar with some milk like content in between the chocolate layers.  he loved them when he was 5 and nothing has changed. 

Many of the products available in the US are available here.  But while the advertising or packaging looks the same, some products get a name change.  For example, Cinnamon Toast Crunch is called Cini Minis here.  The Cat was happy to see that Ben and Jerry's is sold here, but he had met his quota for junk for the day. 

Checkout overseas is no different.  You get charged for plastic bags if you need them and you have to bag your groceries.  Cashiers sit rather than stand and their mission is to run every item through as fast as possible.  No one can possibly bag that quickly.  So what people do is throw the items back into their carts and bag them in a counter area they set up.  I didn't like it then and I don't like it now.  And as I write this, I came up with an idea.  Next time, I will just leave my bags in the car and take my unbagged groceries to the car to bag them there.  

My gripes about today's experience was with the staff at the supermarket.  The floors were pretty filthy and they have these large floor scrubber that they use to clean the floor.  The thing is that they choose to clean their filthy floors while a ton of people are shopping and they are not that courteous.  The Austrian cashier also was quite nasty with me when she asked for a type of newspaper and I did not know what she was talking about (there were several to choose from).  She then spoke to me in English and I got her the right paper.  I seriously need to sign up for German because the only newspaper I'm familiar with is Der Spiegel.

We returned home for a late lunch and got started cleaning this place.  The place was full of dust and cobwebs.  Guess its been empty for a while.  We all kept sneezing.  The smell of Ajax now permeates the house and it is a most welcome scent ever.  And for dinner, we are making Wiener Schnitzel. 

Tomorrow we explore!