Dispatches from the North: Retrospective Part I

My husband is home on leave now for four weeks leading up to his 6 month deployment. To maximize the time I can spend with him over the next 4 weeks I am going to be posting some of my first posts from last year from my personal blog Anglophile’s Digest and give an update on some of the observations and frustrations I posted about a year ago when all of this was brand new to me.

Here is an excerpt of a post from September 2008:

I still feel like I speak a completely different language. I needed chicken broth for a recipe and Jason was going out to get a paper so I asked him to pick me up some chicken broth. He came back with condensed cream of chicken soup. We went to the grocery store and I asked him to point me toward the soup, I found a can of chicken broth but to my surprise the word “broth” here means exactly the opposite of what it means in America. Add this difference in dialect in with the fact that I was grocery shopping with a man and you have a married couple standing in the soup aisle of the grocery store trying to figure out what they call “chicken flavored water” here in this country and where they might keep it in a grocery store.

This seems to be a conversation we have over and over again and its a good thing we are very patient with each other because every time we go into a store it seems like the thing I am looking for is not in the place I would expect it to be and after explaining it to a sales associate while they look at me like I am either crazy or just fascinating they finally decode my secret language and have a “Eureka! You mean bobbledy boos!” moment and then point me in the right direction. If anything this experience of describing things has made it clear to me at times how arbitrary products names are on both sides of the pond. I find myself so often having to break down something into descriptives and then I am always left wondering “Why on earth do we call it zucchini?”

There are still a few items that I simply can’t find the name for. For example, it is autumn and I am naturally craving some hot apple cider. Much to my frustration, the term “cider” is already taken and is my favorite alocholic beverage. I asked Jason the other day if he knows where I could find “cloudy apple juice” or “unfiltered apple juice” and he seemed to be drawing a complete blank. I haven’t given up faith that at least by the time winter rolls around I will have identified what they call cider here and I will be enjoying some mugs of hot cloudy apple juice.

A year later, grocery shopping is now a total breeze for me. I have never been a huge fan of grocery stores, crowds of people who aren’t paying attention to where they are going is not my ideal social situation. In fact, before I moved here I ordered my groceries online and had them delivered to my home. One thing I didn’t mention in this post last year was that I actually cried the first time I went to the grocery store. The cupboards were completely empty since nobody had been living in the flat for 7 months so we had to get a bit of everything. I felt so inept at the simple task of grocery shopping it was all just a bit too much for me. Now that I am familiar with the layout of the local ASDA store it has made shopping a fairly routine activity for me. I have gotten to the point where I can organize my grocery list by aisle and zip up and down the store in record time and I am taking full advantage of the range of products available.

If there is one thing I have gained through this experience, I have lost any “brand snobbery” I had before. Between large shopping trips I go to Aldi to stock up on produce, cheese, yogurt, milk and other essentials . (Yes, the same Aldi you may be familiar with in the States.) Most of the brands both in the supermarket and the discount stores are unfamiliar to me so I didn’t perceive a difference between the “name brands” in the supermarkets and the “off brands” in Aldi. Abandoning my former brand snobbery has saved me a lot of money without actually compromising on quality.

To update on my search for cider, I never quite found what I was looking for. I did however find the cartons of apple juice available at Aldi when heated and seasoned with a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg comes fairly close although it lacks a bit of the sharpness of fresh apple cider. I guess I will just have to wait until I get back to Michigan to enjoy a real mug of cider.