Day 3 in Florence: I mastered the art of… grocery shopping?

Yes that’s right, grocery shopping! We received prepaid supermarket gift cards as part of our meal plan, and my roommate, some friends and I decided to stock up on some of the essentials. Since we live about 20 minutes from school, and most of the restaurants are located around school as a central point, sometimes it is not our greatest desire to walk across town to eat. My roommate Jacqueline and I decided we would put our cooking skills (mostly hers) to the test in our brand new, never been used kitchen! We walked to a market about 15 minutes from our apartment called Essalunga. Walking in we were about to get a cart until we saw the 1 euro usage fee. Even though I am in Italy I am still a college student, therefore I decided to pass. Lucky for us there were shopping baskets free of charge inside. We casually walked through the automatic doors, grabbed our baskets and BOOM- a mixture of babies crying, produce flying, and Italian words were circulating all around me. Okay, so maybe it was not quite that dramatic, but it was a very hectic experience. I was instantly overwhelmed. I have quickly learned that the Italian culture has a very different take on proxemics than Americans do. Their concept of personal space is much smaller than ours. This is fine it just takes some getting used to-there was not much order to the process of collecting groceries here, it was more like a free for all on black Friday. Trying to dodge the little bambinos helping their parents shop, attempting to locate items on our list, and once we found what we thought these items were, trying to read and distinguish what it was we were actually going to purchase was a serious mission! I did my best not to let myself be consumed by the chaos and stick to our ultimate goal; dinner. Once our baskets were filling to the brim with pasta, oil, butter, salad, basil, fruit, yogurt, and a few other items we promptly remembered the lengthy walk back to the apartment we still had ahead of us. As we were about to check out we saw we would not only have to pay for our groceries, but our grocery bags as well. To avoid the extra cost each time we went to the grocery store we bought large reusable bags for 1 euro. Walking back to the apartment I left accomplished and successful. It sounds silly but it’s the small cultural advances that can sometimes mean the most.

When we arrived back at our apartment Jacqueline and I made our first home-cooked meal in our new apartment. With the basics and limited ingredients at hand we prepared penne pasta with oil, butter, and garlic, salad, which was a much needed fulfillment to my vegetable deprived diet, and white wine. It was not the most gourmet of meals but I was proud of us for our accomplishments! We set out little table in our little living room and enjoyed our meal in the comfort of our apartment with Mr. Sinatra gracing our ears with his majestic voice. It was a wonderful way to spend a lovely evening and to end a very busy day.