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Grocery Stores in Madrid
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In Spain, I feel the most foreign when I’m shopping for groceries.
The most obvious weirdness is the huge fleshy pig legs hanging everywhere. Some grocery stores seem to string the legs along the top of the doorway like a curtain. You have to push aside the hanging corpses to enter the supermarket and buy your dinner.
It’s strange enough that people still have to appetite to buy meat after this, but what’s stranger is the way they go about purchasing meat. Just like grocery stores in the States, grocery stores in Spain have a butcher’s counter, usually in the back. In the States, people wait in line, staying put while they wait their turn.
In Madrid, at the butchers, people multitask during the time they’re waiting in line. Actually they don’t wait in line at all really. They just tell the other people in line to pretend that they’re waiting in line, while in reality; they’re doing other things around the store.
My Madrid friend, Maricira, says that, if there is no one at the front of the butcher’s line, you must not place your order, but instead ask the people around to tell you who is next, because, for Spanish people, part of the waiting-in-line routine entails asking those around you to hold you place in line while you do other things.
Consequently you can never assume that it is your turn if you are merely physically the next person in line.
A small woman asked us to hold her place and walked off to get fish. Just as the butcher was asking us what we wanted, she reappeared out of nowhere with a look on her face that dared us to answer him. We, of course, kept silent and told her to go ahead.
Then, when it was finally our turn to order ham, Maricira ordered a quarter and a half kilo.
I found this order to be challenging but the butcher didn’t flinch; apparently it’s a very common amount to order. After spending an hour wandering exactly how much a quarter and a half amounted to, I took out a calculator and did the math. It comes out to .375. A little more than a third.
I have know idea why a quarter and half would be anymore desirable than a third. Maybe the entire Spanish population decided oneday that 1/3 was just a little too small and the pefect amount is not a quarter or a half, but a quarter and a half. Maybe all butchers are just math nerds. Who knows?
Then there are things that I can understand at the grocery store:
People bring their own cloth-covered carts to carry their groceries home.
A bottle of wine is 1 euro. Sometimes less.
For big purchases, some grocery stores will deliver your food to your house.
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