Shopping 101

I have received a request of information from my lovely Nana about the type of food I eat here in Finland. But before I respond to this request, I will tell you the story of my first Finnish shopping experience that I meant to tell you about weeks ago.

When I first arrived in Finland, the day I was going to move into my apartment, my fellow Canadian and I decided to stock our kitchens with all the essentials while we still had access to a car. Our student tutor pointed us in the direction of a grocery store and off we went. first was the produce section. Collecting all the necessary fruits and veggies wasn't too hard because they look the same all over the world. Proud of our collections we went to move on when I had a flashback to my time in South Africa and the then foreign concept of weighing your produce before hand and taking it to the till with a barcode sticker on it. I scanned the produce area and saw some similar looking machines. First crisis averted and embarrassment avoided.

Next we had the navigate the world of Finnish labels. Our Finnish friend from field school had been kind enough to provide us with some basic grocery-related vocabulary, so we new words like maito (milk), voi (butter), juusto (cheese), kala (fish), and some others. This was very helpful when finding things, but less helpful when distinguishing low fat from delicious milk. For this we had to rely on the efficacy of marketing, assuming lighter coloured packaging meant lighter milk (and it worked!!). After about an hour of clumsily collecting everything necessary to stock an empty kitchen, we moved towards the till.

Only one till was open, so we stood in the only available line to wait. Once we had stopped the learning experience that was our shopping trip, we had time to look around. Maybe see what other people were buying and judge a whole countries diet based on that, like I do back home. That was when we realized the error of our ways. the people in line around us had a maximum of 5 items each and there we were. Carts piled high with everything a new kitchen could ever want or desire. Surrounded by people buying chips and beer for a relaxing evening. Then it dawned on us. We were about to buy everything we would need to survive...at a convenience store. We were next in line, making sneaking out and putting some of our stuff back impossible.

It took the woman about 5 minutes to ring all of my stuff in, at which point there was a growing line of 7 people behind me carrying only candy, chips and beer and looking disgruntled at best. To top it all off the cashier didn't speak English and we had no idea how to ask for bags in Finnish. So our groceries were piling up on the conveyor belt behind the till as we tried to mime that we needed bags. Now there are 10 people behind us in line. We had officially become those incompetent foreigners. Eventually we successfully mimed our need for bags, hung our heads in shame and ran from the grocery store. I snuck a glance back as the sliding doors began to close behind us...they had just opened a new till.