Blogging Boston - 2

Shopping: The act of purchasing articles from shops.
Shopping in India: Dialling nearest shopkeeper to have items delivered home.
Shopping in America: The exquisitely painful process of having ones back broken, wrists sprained, and spirit trod upon. When done with friends: hilarious.

Americans are nuts. Plain kooky.
They have, and I am not making this up, half fat, quarter fat, half and half, skimmed, low fat, medium fat, flavored, soy, semi skimmed, quarter skimmed and three quarters skimmed.
They do not have milk.
Now, fair peoples from the rest of the planet, hear this.
These blessed geniuses from the land of plenty, have this amount of mind boggling variety in over a thousand different commodities.
All located under one gargantuan roof.

Oh, and in case you are sitting back in your chairs with a smug smile on your faces thinking "Ah hah! Kulkarni is on his first visit to Walmart!" - well, umm, no.
This was a food store.
Perfectly reliable, sober and sane sources inform me that larger stores, such as Walmart, would have twice this size in food alone - and about twenty other departments, again - under one roof.
Nuts. Plain kooky.

And I'll tell you why, dear readers.
Because when Kulkarni is given a cart and told to go shop, he will rely on the little list that mummy has given him. Faithfully following to the letter the items neatly numbered on the list, Kulkarni will shop, and get back to mummy all the items that mummy wanted.
Kulkarni will then fall flat on the sofa, until mummy wakes him up for dinner.
This on the rare occasions when the phone call wala system does not work.

But here, in the land of the ridiculously plenty, Kulkarni with a shopping cart is flummoxed. Flabbergasted. Foiled. And other alliterative words that may not be used on nice pages like these.

How to choose one out of a hundred - all of which look equally good. How to not walk about drooling like Dracula at a ball? How to not pick all of the meats available?
Tell, tell?

Which is why Kulkarni walked out of there with four different bags, all bursting with goodies that would have made Claus (he of the Santa fame) look positively pedestrian.

And then Kulkarni fumbled again.
Because in America, he does not have a bike, or a car, or even a rickshaw that he can hail.
He has a taxi that will strip him of all the money that he has, and he has a subway that is more confusing than a Ph.D. in Operations Research.
So Kulkarni, and colleagues (bless 'em!) decide to take the subway.

So there we were, Kulkarni and colleagues, all of us suitably loaded with goodies, standing at the platform, waiting for the train to trundle in.
Info: If you want to cross platforms, you climb onto train, head over to next station, and then change platforms. Because if on the same station, you come out on one side, and into the other, you pay double.

Nuts. Kooky.

So we got into train so that we may get out the other side.
More Info: When in train, hold onto railings. Else, when train starts, and stops, like Newton uncle said, you will fall over each other, repeatedly. Of course, given the number of bags you are holding, you cannot hold onto railings.
So make like professional clowns, fall all over the train, and laugh helplessly.

Still more Info: Americans are very very polite, or very very scared. All through our nine pin act, we had the other travellers in the train staring fixedly at their books, at each other, or out of the window. No glances at us, no wondering what the blue blazes we were up to, no smiles even.
While we, proud children of Bharat Ma, were rolling in the aisles.
I mean, notice the pun. Rather a good one, don't you think?

Having lugged four shopping bags halfway across town - with groceries in them to last me a couple of weeks.
Which means that come month end, Kulkarni and colleagues head out into the cold biting wind of Boston once again.
Sigh.
My kingdom, such as it is, for good old free home delivery.
Time laga to bhi chalega.