Negotiating the weekly shop and other impossibilities...

Boy #2 and I did the weekly shop in The Hypermarket from Hell today and survived, despite spending an hour and a half in traffic on the way home (Moscow's traffic jams are the stuff of nightmares). I'm viewing our expedition as a huge success however, as not only did we survive, but we left there with everything that I had put in the trolley. This may not seem like much of an Event to those of you who's weekly shop at Sainsbury, Tesco and the like achieves the same end each and every time, but let me tell you, here, it's a big deal.

Why? Well, customer service is never something you should take for granted in Moscow. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes not.

'Not' includes the assault course that is negotiating the aisles full of enormous packing trolleys that, in Western supermarkets, usually only get wheeled out when the shop is empty in the small hours. The combination of reasonable prices, other customers hungry for bargains and not used to queuing (or not in the 'after you, Claude' cultural style that this English rose is more used to, anyway), and trying to handle a wonky trolley weighed down with a feisty 4 year-old hanging off the front does not make for a relaxing shopping trip.

Making it through that without needing to reapply your deoderant is enough of a challenge but then you need to run the gauntlet of putting your shopping through the till without then being faced by the blank look the cashier gives you when your fruit is not barcoded correctly or there is no label on the waste-bin you're trying to buy. There's no Checkout Captain here to rush off and find out what the price should be, oh no. Just a shrug of the shoulders and a tacit acknowledgement by both the customer and cashier that it would have nice to have some mandarins but, well, they've been barcoded by you, the stupid consumer as satsumas, so better luck next time...

Of course, the incorrect bar coding probably wouldn't happen if I had managed to get any kind of grip on learning the language before moving out here, but I have to admit that whilst it was a priority, it was clearly not high enough on my pre-departure list. I've written about this in Powder Room Graffiti if you want to see a perfect example of the best laid plans of mice and men not quite working out as intended...