Shop n Learn

The other day I suddenly realized that my spanish has actually improved quite a bit, or at least in the vocabularios (vocabularies) department, in comparison to a few weeks ago. You know how I knew? It was because my grocery shopping time has significantly shortened! I remember when I went grocery shopping for the first time, it literally took me 30 mins to buy a hand soap, shampoo and conditioner. It took me 15 minutes to buy milk. It took me another 10 minutes to buy empanada wraps. You can of course figure out from the pictures or packaging of what they are but the problem is there are many different kinds of them in front of you and you want to pick the one you want exactly; and sometimes you think you know but you don't know...

Like this one time, I really wanted apple and orange juice, so I ran into a store to the fridge, saw the packaging with fruit pictures all over them, and picked out one with apple and one with orange on them. The design had this kid riding a bike or running with a kite..I don't remember exactly but I thought cool, that looked 'healthy', I'd get them. Got home, couldn't wait to have some apple/orange juice (yes I like to mix them up, I don't think that's weird, or is it?!). Expected to see a stream of sparkly golden stream of sweet apple juice coming out from the box but noo, it's creamy white! Opened the orange one, same creamy white liquid with a tint of pale orange. I was like what's going on?! Is it bad? but I've never seen bad apple juice turned white...so then I asked my Argentine landlord and he said that wasn't juice, it's soy milk with fruit flavor (seriously?!). I did have some of it, it tasted alright but not my cup of tea really, but apparently they love it here. Okay....

So with that experience, I took extra caution when buying things. This one time I bailed out buying milk because I just wasn't sure which one to get. When there were at least 4 different kinds in front of you, all of them sorta looked the same and with all these writings on them, while I know I could be dumb dumb sometimes, but it could really get quite confusing! After some learning, I now can buy milk with confident but there's still a long way to go...I still have to figure out spices, cheese (the only name I can recognize is mozzarella, that's it!), different part of meat, types of salsa (sauce) by names, cooking methods, cleaning products...and then there's the pharmacy....loong way to go my friend, looong way to go...