The Shopping Game

Sometimes in English classes we play a "Shopping Game" as an interesting way to practise the sort of language you need to go shopping.

But in "real life" (if that's what this is) we play shopping games every time we venture out.

We like to try new things - which is pretty well everything here - and so yesterday we decided to try a different shop. Not down the back alley to the grubby little Sunny supermarket, not buying off the street vendors with their knee-high displays of produce. Let's go to one of the big shopping centres which we haven't tried yet. "RTMart".

So we went into the shop and wandered through the ground floor section with clothing and other household goods, picked up a couple of things to buy, and then wanted to find either a checkout or a way to the food section. After some fairly lost, aimless wandering we remembered that in a similar store the way out was tucked away in the back corner of the store, out of sight. Sure enough, there was the secret escalator to the second floor.

Pretty food

Obviously we were out for adventure, because when we found this in a section marked "handmade goodsand foods", we actually bought it.

The child in me told me there had to be lollies or something sweet, why else would you make pretty flowers ... I didn't realise how scary the thing on the bottom right corner there was until I opened the pack. We didn't stop there, we also bought one of these:

I remember from home economics lessons that you don't put raw meat next to anything, including vegetables, so maybe it was worrying about this which made me miss the other obvious points.These could not possibly be actual peeled prawns. Real prawns are not that colour, nor that perfect. Besides, prawns are not sold peeled here. I have a clear and recent memory of a refined young Chinese lady in a restaurant selecting a prawn with her chopsticks and placing the whole thing, shell and all, into her mouth but leaving the head protruding from her lips, chewing thoughtfully for a while, and then delicately leaning forward to spit the shell, tail, head etc onto a plate.

Underneath the pretty flowers and stuff it was all carrots. The other things - well I recognised the seaweed, and capsicum, and - were they snails, or duck's tongues? (I have heard that people eat them, but I'm not sure what one looks like) And the 'prawn' dish was almost entirely onions underneath. At least that had some taste. With both dishes I could not seem to entice any taste into the food (adding herbs, spices, sauces etc) nor out of it. I suppose if I was fond of hot, spicy chili I could have made a tasty meal. Otherwise, I found everything there - even the pretty flowers - had no taste at all, they might just as well have been sweet.

Pick an aisle, any aisle

And then there is that special game foreigners can play, being a people-magnet. Many times in a market-place we have taken pity on stalls that are getting ignored - simply standing there for a few seconds will draw potential customers from all over.

Somehow its a little more frustrating when the game is played in supermarket aisles with trolleys. We wanted to buy a glue-stick in the stationery aisle. All of a sudden, half the store realised they had the same need and were reaching across and around us, pushing our trolley here and there in their desperate attempts to grab some glue for themselves.

The maze

These shopping centres are carefully designed to foil any attempt at theft - it seems to be most peoples' greatest fear, that they will somehow be robbed.

On the way in, we did the right thing and stowed our back-packs in those little lockers where you press the button and a tiny flimsy piece of paper pops and out floats away on a puff of air - this is the way back into the locker so it needs to be guarded with your life. The locker popped open and I entombed my bag after carefully removing and pocketing things (like my glasses) I might need.

Our shopping completed, we came through the checkout - and I caught sight of the sign announcing the toilet, which I really wanted to visit before we went to lunch and/or caught the bus home. But ... I had forgotten to take my pack of tissues out of my bag. My galant husband said, "wait here, I'll go get it out of your bag in the locker". As I saw him disappear down the escalator I had the first feeling of foreboding - there was no 'up' escalator in that section of the store. Also, there was a security check between me and the toilet - I had to pass between those things that set off alarms and show my receipt to get out (and I didn't have the receipt, Peter did).

Of course, we'd have done much better to nip back into the store and buy some tissues - as we told each other some 20 minutes later when we were reunited after Peter had been downstairs, finally got his bearings and discovered the right set of lockers, realised he couldn't get back to me with the bag and had to stash it in a new locker, worked his way through the ground floor store, up the hidden eslcalator and through the maze of crowded supermarket aisles, and pushed past the customers at one of the check-outs. Oh, and when we finally both got down the escalator there were also conveniences on the ground floor that would have been a lot easier to access ...

All part of the fun of the game.