Of Inuit and Epidurals

I think Tuesday night must be some unofficial single’s night in the supermarkets of Vancouver.

Strolling home from work yesterday after a (disturbingly non-boring) class on clinical trial design, I stopped in at Meinhardts. Meinhardts is an appallingly expensive grocery store which nonetheless, I occasionally frequent, due to vagarious stocking of Tim Tams. I went in yesterday and, while passing the prepared meals section, the meatballs caught my eye. Casually listening in while I waited my turn, I decided the man ahead of me must have been a Quebeqois because he was conversing with the shop assistant in both French and English. He finished his purchasing, and moved to the side to pack his goods,while I took my turn at the counter.
“Can I have two meatballs please?”
“Sorry, what?”
“Can I have two meatballs please? “(this time pointing at the container behind the glass)
“Oh ( I could almost see the lightbulb switch on) You said Meatballs. Sure, perfect.”

Meanwhile the man beside me appeared to be convulsing, fortunately with laughter.
“I had no idea what you were saying, “mate-ba-ahls”, ” then returned to laughing again, before saying
“You’re South African, right”
“Um, no. Australian. I can’t understand how you can flick between two languages so easily, but not understand me , speaking English”
“Well, I’d be happy to teach you”
“Teach me what, French or Canadian, because what you speak is certainly not English”
“I’d teach you whatever you want” and fixed me with decidedly sleazy grin.

Right. Awkward. I feigned interest in preprepared salads until the sales assistant had packed up my meatballs and I could sneak off and hide in cheese section.

Not ten minutes later, I was completing my dinner shopping in the Safeway near home. Safeway has a loyalty card which you have to sign up for to get sale items. You can either swipe the plastic card they give you, or the sales assistant keys your phone number into the cash register to qualify. But I only had about four items so when the sales assistant asked me for my card, I said I didn’t have one. The guy behind said
“Oh no , let me use my card for her.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, “do you get points for purchases?”
“No, but you’ll get a discount if anything’s on sale”
“Well thank you” thinking to myself, I’m pretty sure nothing is on sale but he’s just being nice so we’ll go through with it. Sure enough no discount.
“Oh well, better luck next time” I said.
“Well there’s one good thing”, he said, “Now you have my phone number”
What, what? Please, this is corny enough for the Roxy, and it’s Tuesday night, AT THE SUPERMARKET.

So I have decided there is some unwritten convention that the supermarket is the place on go on a Tuesday. Either that, or my new winter boots purchased for warmth and waterproofness, are not in fact hilarious in the extreme, but instead incredibly alluring. What do you think?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Canada, Expat life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.