Shopping, hurt joints and insurance

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Every Wednesday evening at six a seminary van makes a grocery store run. Anyone at the seminary can hitch a ride. I and 7 others went to the grocery store this evening. It is the same store I talked about in earlier posts. I had a fairly long list and found everything except peanut butter and brown rice. I was a bit surprised at how many shoppers were in the store on a Wednesday evening. The place was quite crowded.

“You didn’t look low enough,” Cheryl said, “the peanut butter is stuck on the very bottom shelf, below the jelly.”

“Well,” I replied, “I found the jelly and saw that chocolate paste they sell here and in China to put on your bread. I’ll look lower next time. I guess it was at Tesco that I found the peanut better before.”

“I haven’t seen brown rice,” Cheryl said.

“I found a small bag, I guess it was at Tesco, but it is almost gone. I’ll have to go there to find more I guess,” I said as we climbed into the van to return to the seminary.

Shopping in a country where you are almost totally ignorant of the language presents a challenge. You have your list, you know what you want, but how do you find what is on your list? Well, pictures on the can, jar or bag help. For instance a picture of kernels of corn on a can is a pretty good indicator that, indeed, the can contains corn. But what do you do where there are no pictures on the container? Then you either depend on looking for a word that gives you a clue, or you depend on pure dumb luck. This evening tuna was on my list. I found the potted meat section. Pictures on cans were my clue but I saw no pictures of tuna. I saw salmon. In fact there in bold English were cans saying, Pink Salmon. But, also, no cans simply saying tuna, and no cans with a picture of tuna ... no Charlie, no fish jumping, no graphics of tuna. But, a-ha, there were cans with the word “Tunak ve vlastni stave.” The word “tunak” was my clue. I bought four cans. Is it really tuna? Is it good? I haven’t a real clue yet as we have not opened and eaten a can yet. We’ll keep our fingers crossed and hope I was right. It is all in good clean fun, this living in a land where most of the time you haven’t a clue of what is being said, or what is really in the can on the shelf. I’ll let you know at a later date how the TUNA was.

Snow was falling when we got up and continued to fall all morning, dumping about three inches on us before it ended about noon. The forecast on the Internet is for us to have snow each day for the next five or six days. I doubt it will amount to much. It seems that Prague is prone to receiving small amounts of snow often. This does not surprise me. I remember the first winter I was in Germany, it was 1961, I began to wonder if the sun ever shone. I was stationed between Mannheim and Heidelburg and for several months we saw no sunshine. Day after day after day it was cloudy and every day there was a slight drizzle for a good portion of the day. Prague is almost directly east of Frankfurt and the weather is much the same here, only colder, so we have occasional light snow instead of drizzle. Frankly, I prefer the snow.

Nancy called Blue Cross in the States today to see find out what she has to do to comply with their rules on seeing a doctor or going to a hospital here. Her foot continues to hurt and she wants to have an x-ray taken to determine whether a bone is broken. Blue Cross gave her some information, like which hospital to go to and took down our telephone number saying they would call us back. Do you find it amazing that they actually did call us a few hours later? We had just walked into our apartment from working in the library and the phone rang. The insurance company rep realized that she had given Nancy technical information on hospitals, phone numbers, street addresses, etc. but had not offered to let her talk to a nurse. She called back to see if Nancy would like to talk to a nurse. With visions of a Janet Hennery or a Sarah Callanan on the other end of the line she jumped at the chance. The nurse, Melanie was fantastic as most nurses are. She totally changed the game plan. Nancy had planned to see an orthopedic specialist. The nurse said there was no sense in that because he/she would need an x-ray in order to make a good decision. She said to go to a good university hospital where the x-ray technician could read the x-ray and a doctor would almost certainly be available in that area to do whatever else was needed. That would be one visit, one bill, instead of two or three going back and forth. She also gave care ideas which at that point were the same things Nancy has been doing for three weeks since the original injury.
Nurse to the rescue!!!


Daniela, at the Registration Office gave Nancy detailed information on how to get to the hospital. Daniela was an expert on the directions to the hospital Blue Cross recommended. She has a big brace on her ankle/leg from a recent injury. She went to this same hospital and said it was close by and excellent. So, tomorrow we will set off not knowing where we are going, but with directions to get there.

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Photos

The Jeneralka Bus Stop
This is where we catch the bus to downtown Prague. You can see one of the wooded hills that line the Sarka Valley.

Comments

[anonymous]

Hope you get the Advil soon! Hope you didn't do too much damage to the foot.... - Joyce Miller