Susan and Patrick had to leave town for the weekend, they had a conference in Lille. Susan left on Thursday morning and Patrick left very early Saturday. This meant that Angela and I would have to go to the supermarket by ourselves. As Angela is infirm due to her surgery, she is unable to drive or walk for a long period of time. This meant that I had to drive, and yes, do most of the shopping. Now I must point out that driving in France is a lot like driving in a video game, speed limits are not always observed, the roads meander, the likelihood of hitting another car is pretty great. The only exception to this video game analogy is that if you do hit something, there is no re-start button.
As you might glean, I'm a little petrified to drive in France, but to make matters worse, Susan has left the keys to her Mercedes, expecting me not only to drive in France but to drive her company Mercedes. At first I thought Angela wouldn't be coming along, but she decided that she was going to come; this calmed my nerves a little. There was still a little problem with Susan's car, it is a Mercedes A-series. If you are unfamiliar with the A-series the important things to know is that it is a well made, cute car, however, it is only one step up from the Smart Car in size. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not an enormous person (about 6 feet and 195 pounds), but this car made me feel like a giant. I lowered the seat as far as possible and my head only cleared the ceiling by about an inch and a half. This wasn't the biggest problem however, the biggest problem was that I was so high in the seat that the rearview mirror blocked my entire view out of the right-side of the windshield. This would present a problem to most people, it became even more frightening when I was blowing through round-a-bouts at 60 km/h. Oh, and to make matters worse, in France the car to the right has the right of way, all of most of the time. If that doesn't make sense to you, don't worry, it doesn't really make sense to me either. I've been told the car on the right always has the right of way, except in the this case, and this case, and this case. Frankly, I understand it to mean, there really is no rule and people do as they please. Well, despite the other drivers best efforts, we got to the supermarket in one piece.
We walked into the supermarket. Before going any further this store must be explained in greater detail. It is a large market that borders upon a Wal-Mart (except it has more food, and less cheap plastic crap from China). On our list we had a number of different goods, from food for the weekend to non-food items such as an alarm clock (I will get back to the alarm clock later). Angela collected some things that we needed and her foot was starting to bother her, so I went and took everything she had, put it into the big cart, and she went and sat down. It had been rather uneventful until this point, but there were a few items left on the list that I hadn't been able to find. At this point I want to ask everyone out there if they know what the French word for sweet potato is? As far as I can tell it is not "pomme de terre sucre." I still haven't found the sweet potatoes, but I digress.
Angela was sitting on a couch outside of the store (it's in a mall), and I'm looking for the last items on the list. Susan and Patrick have a cat and they needed some food for the cat. I wandered this store for about 20 minutes without finding the cat food, when I finally found an employee and asked, "Ou est le chat . . ." and then it occurred to me that I don't know the french word for food. I decided the best course of action was to pantomime the international symbol for "eat." The look upon this man's face was one of complete confusion/horror. He either had no idea what I was looking for, or he thought I wanted to buy one of those delicious roasting cats. I can only imagine that this Frenchman now believes that Americans love to eat cat, in fact we love it so much that we travel to other countries and look for it in the supermarkets, and we cannot fathom the idea that a supermarket wouldn't sell cat. Realizing how big of a fool I must have looked like, I just walked away, eventually finding the cat food.
After finding all food items on the list (with the exception of "pomme de terre sucre"), I went to go find some other items, we needed batteries, pens, and an alarm clock. I found the batteries and pens with no problem. Now it was time to get that alarm clock. I walked over to the homewares section of the store, thinking it'll probably be near the bed linens, maybe near some of the other small appliances. I didn't find an alarm clock, but I kept walking through pockets of horrible stench. Apparently, there was a Frenchman with awful gas wandering around the home section of Carrefour. As if the stench weren't bad enough, however, I was walking all over this section of the store and I kept running into the same people, who no doubt smelled this odor as well, and who I swear were looking at me with disgust. I wanted to clarify that I was not the one leaving the aroma behind, but remembering my cat food experience and realizing I don't know what the French word for crop-dusting is, I simply proceeded to checkout and left.
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