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Published: March 10th 2006
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Grocery Shopping
The lady at the end of the line in the two-toned blue jacket is our friend Cheryl the mother of two little boys, wife of a student, friend and counselor to all. She really needs to get to the grocery store!!!!
Every Wednesday the seminary provides a van and a driver to take people grocery shopping. We always go to the Delvita grocery store. Why? Because it is the closest one. Life is simple. Last year, while here, I looked at the Delvita logo and thought, "That lion sure looks familiar." Then I realized it is the same lion that Food Lion uses in the states? I wondered if there were a connection. Yes, there is. Delvita and Food Lion are owned by the same parent company. The owner may be the same, but the groceries stocked in the stores are quite different. Considering the two cultures are quite different this is not surprising. For instance the canned vegetable section here takes up about five shelves ... not five sections of selving, but five shelves. Czechs are not big on canned vegetables, or not a wide variety of veggies anyway. The bread section here has a much larger variety than back home and you cannot buy that abomination called White bread here. There is a small round loaf of whole wheat bread that has sun flower seeds mixed through it that Nancy and I like very much. I am going to try to duplicate it when we get home.
American grocery stores seem to always have the problem of people leaving their shopping carts in the parking lot. That is not a problem here and I do not know why American stores do not use the same procedure to solve the problem. The carts lock one to the other at the handle. A short chain locks into the one behind it. When a shopper arrives they put a coin in a slot in the handle and the chain releases and the shopper now has the shopping cart to use. After purchasing their groceries and unloading them, they take the cart back to the cart parking area, slid the chain into the lock and the coin pops out. The customer takes the coin, droppes it in to their pocket or pocketbook and they are on their way and there are no shopping carts all over the parking area. If US stores did the same and you had to put a quarter or fifty cent piece into the cart to release it, I do believe most people would return the cart to get their money back. Maybe in the US they would have to sell tokens for a dollar, or five dollars. I think that would do the trick and solve the problem.
Anyway, each Wednesday evening, at 18:00 those of us who need groceries climb into the van and off we go. It is a time of socializing as well as a time of restocking the pantry.
Oh, and occasionally it is a time when a joke is told. Here is one:
Do you know what language everyone will speak in heaven?
Well, in heaven everyone will speak American English.
Because it is the only language Americans can learn to speak.
We Americans have a well derserved reputation of being monolingual. It is really interesting here. I will be talking to one of the students and ask, "How many languages do you speak?"
There is a slight hesitation and then an answer something like, "Russian, Ukranian, English and German." Another will say, "Serbian, Romanian, English, and Russian, and I can understand all the slavic languages."
And here I am still struggling along trying to speak English. Oh well ....................................
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Bev Dahlman
non-member comment
Shopping carts
A shopping cart system such as you described used to be in use at the Gaithersburg Costco, but for some reason they gave it up. Maybe people found it too difficult to have a coin handy.