Genau

The word "genau" really has nothing to do with the topic of this blog post, but it's a word that I hear so often that it's probably the only German I really know. It means "exactly" or "right."

Now to the real blog post:

Today I had my first experience grocery shopping alone. My aunt and uncle are out of town for the week so I'm staying in their house alone...which also means I have to feed myself.

You'd think that food mostly looks the same in foreign countries so you have a general idea of what you are buying. Unfortunately, from what I do know about Swiss food / condiments, things don't always come in packages you would expect. For example, mayonaise and mustard come in tubes like toothpaste and milk comes in a cardboard box.

For some products, though, they are pretty typical in all countries - such as bread. I bought what I know is sandwich bread but since I don't know the German word for "whole wheet" I think I just settled for plain white bread. There were pictures of fruit on the other bread bags and I didn't want to get home and realize that I bought apricot bread for my turkey sandwich by mistake. I decided not to take the risk.

The other thing I bought was pasta sauce. I mean, I hope it's pasta sauce. It was next to the seafood dips (I am guessing since there were pictures of crabs on the jar) but the jar I bought had a picture of Basil and it was around the corner from the pasta packages, so I'm crossing my fingers that what I bought is pasta sauce and not seafood dip...with basil (that would be weird).

The last thing I bought was sandwich meat. Now here is where things get a little dicey. There are a million kinds of meats in the meat section of the grocery store. And I know they sell horse. So I picked out a package of meat that said Don Pollo (in hopes that maybe it was chicken or some sort of bird). The package also says "pouletbrust gerauchert" which I'm hoping is German for "super delicious turkey breast." If you know what it means and think I have made a terrible mistake, please let me know asap - I plan on eating it in about two hours. Horses are pets, not food.

So after about 30 minutes I was so frustrated that it took me so long to buy bread, sandwich meat and pasta sauce that I just left the store. If I need something else from the store I will just have to do without or cross my fingers that my aunt already has it.

Where is Nynette when you need her?