Super Market

Following traffic signs to locate a supermarket isn’t necessarily a good idea.  Especially if you’re on foot.

“It’s just three blocks away” the receptionist had said “in a straight line.”

Being a simple lad, I thought she meant it was three blocks away.  In a straight line that one could travel.  I hadn’t appreciated that she’s been talking as the crow flies  and had a penchant for trigonometry.  I also wonder if she wasn’t giving directions from a different starting point. 

After ten blocks, I began to get suspicious, but being stubborn as well as stupid, I strode on.  I wasn’t disappointed.  I saw a sign.  Quite clear.  Quite clearly directing me into a run down residential area.  Quite clearly not on the Tourist Trail.  Thankfully I had my new hat on, so I blended right in.

I paced out an intricate Inca design on a grand scale as I paced the streets over the next hour, faithfully following the signs.  The one way system here really is something to behold.  I crossed the ‘Straight Line’ three times as I looped around some of the less well known neighbourhoods of the city.  It was like following a Search and Rescue pattern for a lost ship in a vast ocean.  The fourth time I passed the same bunch of street kids, they began to look at me suspiciously.  They playfully tapped their oil drum seats with sticks and threw stones at my shadow.  Young rascals. 

Spurred on by their high spirits, I jogged the remaining couple of miles to the fabled store.  I could see my hotel from its entrance.  It was probably eight hundred metres away, albeit the other side of a couple of anonymous buildings.  I’d spent the best part of an hour and a half getting here. 

But it was worth it.  I’d only come to replenish our baby milk water supplies but I was in for a treat.  This was a shop designed by a man for a man.  None of your crude Western shopping seduction techniques of fresh fruit and veg, newly baked bread and suggested wines to accompany fish, this store was organised along a stream of consciousness.  In the promotional spots in front of the cash tills were, in order, the following items:  beer, car tyres, bras, folding steps and socks.  Brilliant.

I considered building a cart out of the tyres and steps to carry the bottle water back to the hotel but realised that there probably wasn’t enough room left in my hand luggage for the four Dunlop Radials.  Damn it.

I drank some beer, but a bra on my head and started rolling the fifty gallon barrel of Evian home.  This is what holidays are all about.

Comments

[the boy who likes to]

I hope you didnt take your original route back to the hotel

[Mrs RW]

This only proves what women have always known: men have no sense of direction.

[Carlton]

I was quite tempted to retrace my steps on the homeward leg, Boy, afterall, I'd made some many new friends. But it was getting dark and I suspect those young rascals would be tucked up in bed nice and early.

And Mrs RW, I'll have you know I have a perfect sense of direction, it's just I don't always know where I'm am or where I'm going! c.