Americanisms

After we moved here it took years - years! - of deconditioning before I stopped thinking, every time Sunday rolled around, "hey, we could go to Ikea!" The time between this thought and the corrective "no...can't go to Ikea...Sunday...stores are closed" got shorter and shorter, but it was amazing how often it popped into my head.

And it isn't like going to Ikea was something we did every Sunday when we lived in the U.S. It was just...on the menu somehow. Like oh hey, today we don't have anything scheduled, what could we do? We could go take a walk, or go to the beach, or go to a museum, or go to Ikea. There's always something on the list to get, it's fun to walk around and try the couches, the meatballs are good...

But it's off the menu here. As is most other consumption on Sundays. Even if you don't have a religious opinion about this, it seems like a good plan to take one day a week off from consumer culture, right? 

I mean, I think so. But even so, it was seriously hard to get out of the habit of assuming shopping was a pretty-much-any-time sort of activity.

So. After we went to school today for Christopher's weekly worksheet exchange, we took a somewhat illicit trip to Denner, which is a smaller grocery store that has a cheaper but less healthy selection than the bigger chains (which themselves are, at their very biggest, maybe half the size of a standard American supermarket). Daniel had already done the weekly shopping, but there were a couple of Denner-only items that we were craving, and this seemed like a good, low-risk pre-Easter treat.

I had precisely four things on the list: meat sticks, Oreos, Butterbretzel*, and breakfast sausages**.

The resulting Denner haul:

1 x container refrigerated green olives with garlic

2 x packages of breakfast sausages

2 x packages of Weisswurst

4 x pork cordon bleu

1 x meat sticks

3 x cubes of yeast

1 x box of 6 frozen Butterbrezel
1 x can of ravioli
1 x can of white beans

2 x packages of Oreos

1 x bag of paprika-flavored potato chips

My point is, if you'd asked me I wouldn't have said that I've been missing consuming, or that we didn't have enough processed food in the house. But I also wouldn't have ever said that I was addicted to going to Ikea on Sundays...

*A Butterbrezel is a soft pretzel, cut in half and smeared with, as they say in the UK, "lashings" of butter. Like WAY more butter than a diet-conscious American would ever consider consuming. They are delicious.

** Nürnberger Rostbratwürste. Probably no self-respecting Swiss (or German) person would actually eat these for breakfast. But we do. So there.